Recommendations
Books Like Love Medicine
Best books to read after Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
If Love Medicine moved you — the fourteen voices of the Kashpaws and Lamartines, the reservation as a place of both love and damage, the way each story's small comedy and heartbreak accumulates into something vast — these eight books share its linked-story portrait of a community, its Native American literary tradition, or its engagement with what families carry across generations.
- 1Buy
The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
Joe Coutts, thirteen years old, investigating the rape of his mother on the reservation in 1988 — Erdrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the most direct companion to Love Medicine in her North Dakota series: the same reservation world, the same engagement with the legal and social conditions of contemporary Native American life, and the same investment in a young narrator's attempt to understand the adult world he is being forced to enter; the recommended next Erdrich read after Love Medicine
- 2Buy
Tracks
by Louise Erdrich
An earlier generation of the Kashpaw and Pillager families, 1912–1924, as the federal allotment policy destroys Ojibwe land ownership — the prequel to Love Medicine in Erdrich's North Dakota series; shows the historical conditions (land dispossession, disease, the federal boarding school system) that shaped the world of Love Medicine; recommended for readers who want to understand the history behind the contemporary situations Love Medicine depicts
- 3Buy
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a mixed-race Laguna Pueblo veteran, returning from the Second World War shattered and trying to heal through traditional ceremony — Silko's novel is the closest literary companion to Love Medicine in contemporary Native American fiction: the same engagement with the relationship between traditional spirituality and contemporary Native American life, the same portrait of a community holding together under conditions of loss, and the same use of traditional ceremonial forms within the novel's structure
- 4Buy
House Made of Dawn
by N. Scott Momaday
Abel returning to his Pueblo pueblo after the Second World War, unable to reintegrate, killing a man, going to prison, and moving to Los Angeles — Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut is the foundational text of the Native American literary renaissance that Love Medicine belongs to; where Erdrich uses multiple voices and linked stories to portray a community, Momaday uses a single broken consciousness to portray a man who cannot find his place between the world of the pueblo and the world of postwar America
- 5Buy
The Plague of Doves
by Louise Erdrich
Multiple voices across several generations in a small North Dakota town, organized around a 1911 lynching that has shaped everything that followed — Erdrich's later novel is the most formally ambitious of her North Dakota series; shares Love Medicine's linked-story structure and its portrait of the same North Dakota world but extends it to include the white community of the nearby town and the history of racial violence that underlies the present
- 6Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe and the ghost of her murdered daughter — Morrison's masterpiece shares Love Medicine's engagement with how historical violence is carried through the bodies and psyches of communities across generations; where Erdrich's characters carry the damage of land dispossession and the boarding school system, Morrison's characters carry the damage of slavery; both novels use the supernatural — ghost, vision, love medicine — to make visible the damage that realistic prose alone cannot adequately represent
- 7Buy
There There
by Tommy Orange
Twelve Oakland Native Americans converging on the Big Oakland Powwow — Orange's debut is the urban Native American companion to Love Medicine's reservation-set portrait: the same investment in multiple Native voices, the same engagement with what urbanization has done to Native American community and identity, and the same refusal to accept the myth that contemporary Native Americans are simply the survivors of a dead culture; where Erdrich's characters are on the reservation, Orange's are in the city
- 8Buy
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Junior Spirit leaving the Spokane reservation to attend an all-white high school, drawn in part as a cartoon — Alexie's award-winning novel shares Love Medicine's portrait of a young person on the reservation trying to find a way forward that doesn't require abandoning their community; where Erdrich writes multi-generational literary fiction for adult readers, Alexie writes for a younger audience in a more comic mode, but both are organized around the question of how you honor the community that made you while also building a future that it cannot provide
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