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The Painted Drum: Book summary and reviews of The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich

The Painted Drum

by Louise Erdrich

The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich X
The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich
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  • Published Sep 2005
    288 pages
    Genre: Literary Fiction

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Book Summary

When a woman named Faye Travers is called upon to appraise the estate of a family in her small New Hampshire town, she isn't surprised to discover a forgotten cache of valuable Native American artifacts. However, she stops dead in her tracks when she finds in the collection a rare drum ....From Faye's discovery, we trace the drum's passage both backward and forward in time, from the reservation on the northern plains to New Hampshire and back.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

'Even at low voltage, Erdrich crafts a provocative read elevated by beautiful imagery, as when children near death fly off like skeletal ravens.' - PW Starred Review.
'Erdrich draws us into her exquisitely detailed world effortlessly . . . Hard to believe, but Erdrich just keeps getting better.' - Kirkus Starred Review.

This information about The Painted Drum was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Louise Erdrich Author Biography

Photo: Hilary Abe

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Author Interview

Name Pronunciation
Louise Erdrich: er-drik (means rich earth)

Other books by Louise Erdrich at BookBrowse
  • The Sentence jacket
  • The Round House jacket

14 more...

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