"The Round House"

"The Round House" by Louise Erdrich is a novel that was recommended to me by a friend but it has taken me a while to read it.  A recent short vacation was the perfect time to give this National Book Award Finalist my full attention.

"The Round House" is mainly the story of Joe Coutts, a 14-year-old member of the Ojibwe tribe.  His father is a tribal judge who married late in life and Joe is his only child.  Joe's mother is a tribal enrollment specialist charged with keeping enrollment (and some secrets) confidential.

Their  idyllic life is shattered when Joe's mother arrives home in a traumatized state and it takes some time to unravel details of her rape and attempted murder.  Joe's father and authorities begin searching for the truth and the guilty party while his mother remains traumatized and mostly uncommunicative in her bedroom after a period of surgery and recovery in the hospital.

Although Joe's father takes him into his confidence at times, Joe decides on his own to find the person responsible for basically taking his mother away from him.  His father continues to warn him to stay out of it as he is putting himself in danger.

Although this is the story of rape and justice, it's also the story of Joe's coming of age with his friends and how this family tragedy and other events that summer shape his life.  It's also the story of the lengths a young boy will go to in order to restore his family and bring his mother "home."

In the afterword, Erdrich discusses how "this book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists.  'Maze of Injustice,' a 2009 report by Amnesty International" includes statistics.....86% of sexual assaults on Native women are by non-Native men.  When President Barack Obama signed the Tribal Law and Order Act into law, he called the situation "an assault on our national conscience."

Although the subject matter is not the most pleasant, Erdrich tells the story in a way that makes it very readable as well as informative.  The characters became so real to me that I believed I might encounter them in real life -- a sign of good story telling, I believe!  I will be reading more of her work.  pazt