She hadn’t meant to fall in love with anybody, and was she even in love at all? To be sure, something had clicked. Hugo made her laugh about herself. Laughing made her delirious.
In Gary’s case, there was nothing like being rejected and then embraced. She’d been invisible, at best sneered at by most of the cool guys. Then suddenly adored by Gary, who’d been way too anxious to marry her.
— from “The Mighty Red” (Harper via AP) Louise Erdrich’s “The Mighty Red” was touted early on as one of the big books of the season and this Minneapolis Pulitzer Prize winner exceeds expectations. No wonder BookPage speculated that her 19th novel “might just be a new American classic.” In her first novel since “The Sentence” (2021), Erdrich displays all her writing talents in a multifaceted story set during hardships caused by the 2008 recession in a small town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, named for the north-flowing Red River.
She holds together human loves and foibles, hard-working people, destruction of the land, growing and processing sugar beets, life in a rural community, all surrounding a story about teen and mother-daughter love. Told in short chapters, some only a few paragraphs on the page, it’s tender-hearted, often funny and sometimes dark. It begins with Native American Crystal hauling sugar beets from field to warehouse on the night shift.
Her smart, bored, restless daughter, Kismet, is suddenly noticed by football hero Gary Geist, son of th.