Review: The Round House

The Round House
by Louise Erdrich

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The plot of this novel centers on a boy whose mother is attacked and raped and how he reacts to that event. He is a well drawn character and his story is a page turner. However, the book is padded with lectures on the injustice of the US legal system toward native tribes and with gratuitous background information on characters from other Erdrich books. The legal issues are relevant to the story, but the way the information is inserted into the narrative is clumsy and detracts from, rather than supporting, the story being told about this woman and her situation. I also felt like there were things going on with the woman and her husband that as a reader I wanted to know, but couldn't because the son being the only narrator limited our view--we are literally closed out of the rooms where changes in her responses to the attack occur.