BookBrowse Reviews Python's Kiss by Louise Erdrich

BookBrowse:

In this collection of thirteen stories from Louise Erdrich, man and beast are separate, and yet not at all.

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The title story of Louise Erdrich's collection Python's Kiss features a narrator's recollection of a caged guard dog named Nero and a long-remembered python, both of which carry with them an innate spirit of freedom. Nero's quest for escape creates a sense of kinship within the narrator. Through his eyes she has her "first sensation of self-awareness."

"As I looked into his eyes, which were the same golden brown as mine...I realized that my human body, my human life, was arbitrary. I could have been a dog.

I had a confused sensation that we were both captive—in different bodies, true, but with only one dark way out."

Spirits of all kinds live inside the collection: there is the centuries-old Italian cemetery dweller, the lucky intuition of a Borsalino hat, humankind's symbiotic relationship with horses, empathy extended to a squid served at a restaurant in a broth of its own ink, the instant link forged between a feral cat and the man who rescues her, the cleansing of bad spiritual energy that ties itself to everything. In the final story, a river stone becomes a woman's lifelong companion, a reminder of our connection to the unknowable consciousness of the Earth.

"She dreamed that she had entered a new episode of time, in which she and the stone would become the same through the endless repetition and decay of all things in the universe...flesh would become stone and stone become flesh, and someday they would meet in the mouth of a bird." 

Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and her culture's deep ties to the spiritual realm are beautifully exhibited here. For example, the line between life and death is hazy in many of her stories. In the twin sci-fi pieces "Domain" and "Asphodel," parents grapple with their daughters in an afterlife where their consciousnesses have been uploaded to a cloud-based technology—along with the baggage of generational trauma they carried with them.

Erdrich's characters are flawed, courageous and ashamed, lonely and terrified, and always longing for something: not only freedom, but companionship at all costs, for a way to forget the what ifs that still haunt and the grief that comes with them, reminding us that regret is just longing for what might have been. Yet, Erdrich never lets cynicism take root. There is always another way of seeing, another angle of grace presented.

The book is also a labor of love between kin. Erdrich's daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe, is the illustrator of Python's Kiss. In whimsical illustrations, she sets the overall tone of quiet magic in everyday life. It's easy to agree with Erdrich when she says in the acknowledgements that the art "enlarged the scope and meaning of these stories."  

Python's Kiss is for anyone who has wished they were someone else or bonded with an animal, whether human or not. With her signature clarity and emotional precision, Erdrich gets straight to the heart of universal truths we all feel but sometimes cannot articulate. She simply sees as many sides as possible and invites us to do the same.

This review first ran in the April 8, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.