The Antelope Wife

"Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves, generation to generation, across bloods and time. Once the pattern is set we go replicating it," writes Louise Erdrich in The Antelope Wife, her sixth novel. Rooted in the landscape of city life, yet continually influenced by the power of Ojibwa family, the intricacies of Ojibwa language and religious belief, this book extends the branches of the families who populate Erdrich's work and reflects the irrevocable patterns set in motion by certain fateful acts.

The Antelope Wife is a novel of connections in which history, lust, contemporary urban Native American life, hand-me-down names, and legends, as well as sacred myth, combine. Set in Minneapolis, originally an important trading center and hunting ground, still a magnet for many native people from nearby reservations, the story goes back in time. The novel begins with a soldier, who deserts the cavalry during a cruel raid on an Ojibwa village to chase a dog bearing on its back a baby on a cradle board strung with breathtaking blue beads. Generations later, a fast-talking trader kidnaps a silent and graceful woman from a powwow. In a haunting re-creation of a native tale, the woman is part antelope. Hunter and hunted change identities. The Antelope Wife changes people. Nothing is ever the same again for friends and family.

The intertwining lives and themes of the novel include tragic loss, confusions of passion, transformation, betrayals, revenge a dog who is "almost soup," and an obsession to re-create a perfect German cake, remembered from a taste decades earlier—a mix of vibrant cultures and ideas. The Antelope Wife extends the branches of the families who populate Louise Erdrich's earlier, award-winning novels, and once again, her unsentimental, unsparing writing captures the Native American sense of despair, magic, and humor in an unforgettable book.