The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

Past and present combine in a contemporary tale of love and betrayal from Louise Erdrich, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2012

'Everything is all knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web will tremble.'

Rozin and Richard, living in Minneapolis with their two young daughters, seem a long way from the traditions of their Native American ancestors. But when one of their acquaintances kidnaps a strange and silent young woman from a Native American camp and brings her back to live with him as his wife, the connections they all hold to the past rear up to confront them. Soon the patterns of their ancestors begin to repeat themselves with truly tragic consequences.

No one is better placed than Louise Erdrich to chronicle the Native American experience. Shrouded in myth and steeped in imagery, this is also a tale of heartbreaking realism which manages to retain a warm and irrepressible humour and belief in the resilience of the human spirit.

• ISBN10: 0694519227
• ISBN13: 9780694519224
• Publish Date: 19 August 1998 (first published 1 January 1900)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc
• Imprint: HarperCollins
• Edition: Abridged edition
• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English

Reviews

[nannah]

DNF @ 7%

If you read the goodreads description of this book, it reveals nothing about why I absolutely cannot go farther than 7%. See, this is why I don't understand why books don't have the same content warnings as video games or movies. There's no reason why books/text are less graphic than visual mediums when you've experienced some kind of trauma or need to stay away from certain things.

Book content warnings (for as far as I got; there's possibly more):
- rape
- kidnapping
- emotional abuse

Basically, the chapter before I stopped, the POVs character (I won't say main because at this point it's not clear who exactly the main character is, if there is one at all) drugs a woman he calls his prey and drives away from the woman's daughters who he leaves sleeping in a tent. Then he drags this woman to his house, ties her up, and forces her to be his wife--and yells at her when her coping mechanisms make her less than perfect in his eyes!

As someone who has gone through things, I can't read on. I don't care if things don't ever return to this level of awfulness, but I have to put this down for my own personal sake. I wrote this all out so maybe someone else can save themselves the pain.