Recommendations
Books Like LaRose
Best books to read after LaRose by Louise Erdrich
If LaRose moved you — the five-year-old boy moving between two grieving families, the Ojibwe tradition that both acknowledges and tries to repair what cannot be repaired, the portrait of two families learning to share what they cannot keep for themselves — these eight books share its portrait of grief and healing, its Erdrich North Dakota world, or its engagement with what tradition offers when the law and private pain have run out.
- 1Buy
The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
Joe Coutts on the North Dakota reservation in 1988 — Erdrich's National Book Award winner is the most direct companion to LaRose: the same reservation community, the same engagement with violent death and the question of what response the community can make when the legal system fails; where LaRose gives a child to mend the tear, Joe Coutts acts on his own; together they represent two different visions of what justice and healing can look like in the same community
- 2Buy
Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
Two Ojibwe families on the North Dakota reservation across fifty years — Erdrich's debut is the entry point to the world that LaRose is set in; the same community seen from 1934 to 1984, with the same families and the same engagement with what love and community can do for people whose lives have been shaped by dispossession and loss
- 3Buy
The Night Watchman
by Louise Erdrich
Thomas Wazhashk fighting the termination legislation in 1953 — Erdrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning companion to LaRose in her North Dakota series; a very different novel (political rather than domestic, resistance rather than grief) but the same community and the same investment in Ojibwe cultural forms as living resources for contemporary people
- 4Buy
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a Laguna veteran, healing through traditional ceremony — Silko's novel shares LaRose's central argument that indigenous traditional practices are living resources for healing, not historical relics; where LaRose uses the child-giving tradition as the vehicle for the families' healing, Silko uses the Laguna ceremony as the vehicle for Tayo's; both novels insist on the contemporary relevance of traditional practice
- 5Buy
A Grief Observed
by C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis's journal about the death of his wife Joy — the nonfiction companion to LaRose in its portrait of grief as an experience that cannot be managed through reason or faith alone; where LaRose tries to mend grief through an act of traditional compensation, Lewis documents the experience of grief as it actually unfolds in a person who knows theoretically what grief is and discovers that theory is no preparation for the experience
- 6Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two Ghanaian sisters and their descendants across eight generations — Gyasi's debut shares LaRose's engagement with how historical violence creates wounds that are transmitted through families across generations and that require more than individual healing to address; where LaRose focuses on the healing of a specific injury in a specific community, Gyasi traces the longer arc of how the Atlantic slave trade's injury travels through eight generations of families
- 7Buy
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Amir and his guilt over Hassan's assault — Hosseini's debut shares LaRose's engagement with how guilt for a failure to protect someone can shape a person's entire life, and what acts of reparation are possible; where Landreaux Iron gives his son as an immediate act of traditional compensation, Hosseini's Amir spends decades trying to find a way to atone for a single act of cowardice; both novels ask what the guilty party owes to the person they harmed and their family
- 8Buy
Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
Two families in Shaker Heights, Ohio — Ng's novel shares LaRose's portrait of two families whose lives become entangled through an act that reveals the differences between them; where Erdrich's families are linked by an accident and a death, Ng's are linked by a custody dispute and the collision of their different assumptions about what family and community mean; both novels are organized around the question of what one family owes another when the events that connect them are too large to be resolved by any simple act of justice
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