The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse: Summary and book reviews of The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich, plus links to an excerpt from The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse and a biography of Louise Erdrich.

For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Compelled to his task by a direct mystical experience, Father Damien has made enormous sacrifices, and experienced the joys of commitment as well as deep suffering. Now, nearing the end of his life, Father Damien dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. He imagines the undoing of all that he has accomplished -- sees unions unsundered, baptisms nullified, those who confessed to him once again unforgiven. To complicate his fears, his quiet life changes when a troubled colleague comes to the reservation to investigate the life of the perplexing, difficult, possibly false saint Sister Leopolda. Father Damien alone knows the strange truth of Sister Leopolda's piety, but these facts are bound up in his own secret. In relating his history and that of Leopolda, whose wonder working is documented but inspired, he believes, by a capacity for evil rather than the love of good, Father Damien is forced to choose: Should he reveal all he knows and risk everything? Or should he manufacture a protective history? In spinning out the tale of his life, Father Damien in fact does both. His story encompasses his life as a young woman, her passions, and the pestilence, tribal hatreds, and sorrows passed from generation to generation of Ojibwe. From the fantastic truth of Father Damien's origin as a woman to the hilarious account of the absurd demise of Nanapush, his best friend on the reservation, his story ranges over the span of the century. In a masterwork that both deepens and enlarges the world of her previous novels set on the same reservation, Louise Erdrich captures the essence of a time and the spirit of a woman who felt compelled by her beliefs to serve her people as a priest. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is a work of an avid heart, a writer's writer, and a storytelling genius.

Media Reviews

Los Angeles Times Messy, ribald, deeply tragic, preposterous and heartfelt, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is a love story, and what shines most brilliantly through its pages are Erdrich's intelligence and compassion. Let the world shake, buckle, storm and burn. Let the people suffer, as they will. It is our connections to the past and the future, through families and connections to kin, that grant us our saintliness and our transcendent power.   Los Angeles Times Messy, ribald, deeply tragic, preposterous and heartfelt, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is a love story, and what shines most brilliantly through its pages are Erdrich's intelligence and compassion. Let the world shake, buckle, storm and burn. Let the people suffer, as they will. It is our connections to the past and the future, through families and connections to kin, that grant us our saintliness and our transcendent power.   Elle Spellbinding….While displaying the lyrical grace of Love Medicine, her first and best novel, The Last Report is angrier, more ambitious, full of 'madness, the stars, sin, and death.' But what surpassing pleasures spring from its wild, dark vision.   New York Times Book Review [B]eguiling . . . Erdrich takes us farther back in time than she ever has, so far back that she comes, in a sense, to the edge of the reservation that has been her fictional world.   New York Times Book Review [B]eguiling . . . Erdrich takes us farther back in time than she ever has, so far back that she comes, in a sense, to the edge of the reservation that has been her fictional world.   Library Journal The investigation of art as mainstay and revelation is particularly sharp, and one hopes Erdrich will pursue this line of thought in her next work. Highly recommended.

Recent Reader Reviews

Rated of 5 by ron sterzinger
Father Damien pray for us
Louise's character Father Damien is probably one of the greatest characters to emerge on the pages of literature since little Oskar Manzerath in Gunter Grass's book the Tin Drum.

Rated of 5 by Mary Saputo
This totally delightful book has made me sit back and reflect upon the worthiness of my own life. (not nearly over yet) It weaves a tale of a lifetimes. One could not understand the end without the beginning or the middle. So many lifes woven...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Kerry Schindler
As a beginning reader, I thought this book was very captivating and interesting.

Rated of 5 by Lewis Koch
What a superb book, continuing the fine web Erdrich has woven of intertwined lives and families in her previous novels. She makes language sing, and though the song is not always pretty, it is always soulful and wise.

Rated of 5 by Elizabeth Ostrander
To me, this book is a poem to my soul, touches me in dreams...an antidote for the limitations of our present culture.

Rated of 5 by Student
This book just didn't pull me in and enthrall me ... I'd much rather read some primary documents on Anishinaabe religious life during the early twentieth century.

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