Recommendations
Books Like The Round House
Best books to read after The Round House by Louise Erdrich
If The Round House moved you — Joe Coutts's summer of investigation, the jurisdictional trap that lets his mother's attacker walk free, the portrait of a reservation community's love and resilience — these eight books share its portrait of Native American justice and injustice, its Ojibwe world, or its coming-of-age in a community under structural assault.
- 1Buy
Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
Two Ojibwe families on a North Dakota reservation — Erdrich's debut is the entry point to the fictional world that The Round House is part of: the same reservation, the same families, the same community seen across fifty years; recommended for readers who want the history of Joe Coutts's world before his story begins in 1988
- 2Buy
LaRose
by Louise Erdrich
Two North Dakota families: Landreaux Iron accidentally kills his neighbor's son and gives his own son LaRose to the grieving family — Erdrich's follow-up to The Round House in her North Dakota series; the same reservation world, the same engagement with Native law and custom as alternatives or supplements to federal law, and the same portrait of what community makes possible when the legal system fails; recommended immediately after The Round House
- 3Buy
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a Laguna veteran, healing through traditional ceremony — Silko's debut shares The Round House's engagement with the relationship between traditional Native practice and the inadequacy of federal institutions to provide justice or healing for Native people; where Joe Coutts confronts the legal inadequacy of the jurisdictional system, Tayo confronts the therapeutic inadequacy of the VA and finds the Laguna ceremonial alternative
- 4Buy
There There
by Tommy Orange
Twelve urban Native Americans converging on the Big Oakland Powwow — Orange's debut is the urban Native American companion to The Round House's reservation portrait: both novels center on violence and its aftermath in Native American communities, both are organized around the question of what justice means in a context where the federal legal system has historically failed Native people, and both use Native literature to insist on the contemporary relevance and complexity of Native American life
- 5Buy
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Scout Finch in Maycomb, Alabama, watching her father Atticus defend a Black man accused of rape — Lee's classic shares The Round House's portrait of a child who witnesses the failure of the legal system to provide justice for a victim of racial violence and must decide what to do with that knowledge; both novels are coming-of-age stories organized around a young person's encounter with the gap between what justice should be and what the law actually provides
- 6Buy
The Secret in Their Eyes
by Eduardo Sacheri
An Argentine court investigator looking back at a rape and murder case from twenty-five years ago that haunts him — Sacheri's novel shares The Round House's portrait of a legal system's failure to bring justice for a victim of sexual violence and the personal cost of that failure to the people who witnessed it; where Joe Coutts acts to fill the gap left by the federal legal system, Sacheri's investigator spends decades trying to find another way
- 7Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two Ghanaian sisters and their descendants across eight generations — Gyasi's debut shares The Round House's engagement with how historical violence and structural injustice shape the lives of communities across generations; where Erdrich focuses on one summer on one reservation, Gyasi traces the longer arc of Atlantic racial violence across continents and centuries; both novels are organized around the same insight that structural violence is transmitted through families and communities whether or not any individual act of violence is ever prosecuted
- 8Buy
The Night Watchman
by Louise Erdrich
Thomas Wazhashk, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa council member, fighting the federal Termination legislation that threatens to dissolve his tribe in the 1950s — Erdrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel shows the same North Dakota Ojibwe community of The Round House a generation earlier, organized around a different but related legal threat to tribal sovereignty; together they bracket the twentieth-century history of the federal government's relationship to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa
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