A review by bucket
The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich

4.0

I have a favorable impression now that I've finished, but in the beginning I really wondered if I would like this. There are so many characters within the first ten or so pages and I absolutely could not keep them straight - especially since they are all inter-related in various ways. As the book went on, I figured out which ones mattered here and ignored the rest, but before I got to that point I did a lot of looking back. I wonder if this problem would have been less apparent if I had read the other novels Erdrich has written about these characters in Argus, ND. I have the sense that some of them are only mentioned in this novel because they are featured in another novel and readers would be interested to get a little bit of an update. Since this isn't a series though, this novel really should have stood alone a little better in the beginning. I did love the magic of this novel - Lipsha's communications with his mom, Zelda's power, and the fear of Fleur. All of these things could be read as reality or symbolically and I really enjoyed that dichotomy.

Themes: modern Native American culture, gambling, visions, superstition, crime and poverty as inescapable cycles, love, luck, dancing