Toni Morrison said that “The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely devastated by its power.” That summarises my thoughts far more eloquently than I could put them, but I would also add that this is not just devastation. It reaches into the raw human experience and shows us stories of love and loss, or trials and tribulations, of heartbreak and betrayal, and everything in-between.
“It struck me how strong and reliable grief was, and death. Until the end of time, death would be our rock.
I know it might sound cliche, but this does not feel like a novel. This is a STORY. A story in its truest form. It does not ask you to care, instead it simply introduces you to characters who are flawed, stubborn, tender, cruel and just so alive that you cannot help but be invested in their stories.
There is nothing sentimental about Erdrich’s compassion. Her characters are often cruel, careless, or self-deceiving, yet they are never reduced to those traits. The novel’s emotional power comes from this refusal to simplify: love and damage coexist, intimacy breeds harm as often as it heals, and connection persists even when people fail one another.
A big discussion with reading or watching anything is the “willing suspension of disbelief”. The person engaging has to want to be immersed, but in reality it has hard to maintain this for such a long period of time such as it usually takes to read a book. I can honestly say Love Medicine did not break for a second. Every time I returned it felt like going straight back into the lives of these characters. They had just been put on pause whilst I went away, and were ready to continue the very moment I set eyes on the page once again. I do not know the last time I felt like that.
“Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin”
Louise Erdrich’s strength, as already touched upon, rests in her characters. The way she seamlessly introduces a variety of characters is nothing short of sensational. What makes this even more noteworthy is how each character has a rich history with one another that is built in from their very first interactions, and their complex family relations we discover gradually is masterfully constructed. This is about a group of characters who in some ways could not be more different from one another, but whose lives have been shaped by the key families around them in their Native American reservation from the 1930s to the 1980s. We witness characters grow from childhood to old age, we see others meet premature tragedy, and others simply fade out of the picture. This is the story of life and of living that Erdrich explores, and she does so with startling, devastating beauty.
5/5 Stars
