So painful, and so hard to put down. Not a train wreck — too elegant and even hopeful for that — more like a ballet on sharp rocks, where every step is pain but the dancers keep going, falling (or getting shoved) once in a while and getting even more badly hurt, then picking themselves up dusting themselves off and going on with grace, supporting the other dancers.

This was beautiful in many ways. The story forces us privileged folk to confront events that we know happen every day "to someone else". It's tenderly told, with an unusual voice that resonated sharply with me: narrated choppily yet richly in first-person by a grown man, describing events and feelings from early adolescence. Quick judgments, resentments, the constant surprise of realizing that you acted with incomplete information, over and over, yet without being able to learn the broader lesson that you don't know it all. Erdrich captures that magnificently. Richly woven with legal and cultural background which enhance the story and the reader.

A smidgen over the top at times — the cruelties too cruel, kindnesses too kind — but as I write this in April 2020, with subhuman monsters in Washington and elsewhere, I no longer have a sense for the depths to which cruelty can sink; and I will gladly take all the kindness I can.