Reading Order
Love Medicine Reading Order
Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984) is a debut novel in linked stories following several generations of two Ojibwe families — the Kashpaws and the Lamartines — on and near a fictional North Dakota reservation from 1934 to 1984. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, it launched one of the most sustained novelistic projects in American literature: the Birchbark House series of interconnected novels set in the same fictional world.
Where to start
Love Medicine
Complete Love Medicine Book List
- 1Buy
Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich·1984·The complete novel. Can be read as a standalone, though it is the entry point to Erdrich's North Dakota series. - Buy
The Beet Queen
OptionalLouise Erdrich·1986·The white characters from the town near the reservation — the second North Dakota novel; can be read independently of Love Medicine but shares its setting and some characters. - Buy
Tracks
OptionalLouise Erdrich·1988·An earlier generation of the Kashpaw and Pillager families, 1912–1924 — the third North Dakota novel, set earlier than Love Medicine; shows the historical pressures (land allotment, disease, religious conversion) that shaped the world of Love Medicine. - Buy
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
OptionalLouise Erdrich·2001·Father Damien, who has served a North Dakota reservation for fifty years and who harbors a profound secret — one of the best entry points to Erdrich's later North Dakota novels for readers who began with Love Medicine.
Love Medicine — Frequently Asked Questions
What order should I read the North Dakota novels in?
Louise Erdrich's North Dakota novels — Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Master Butchers Singing Club, Four Souls, The Painted Drum, The Plague of Doves, Shadow Tag, The Round House, LaRose, The Night Watchman, The Sentence — form one of the most sustained fictional projects in contemporary American literature, set in the same fictional North Dakota world and populated by overlapping characters and families across roughly a century. Erdrich has said that the novels were not designed to be read in any particular order and that each is meant to be independent; but for readers who want to understand the fictional world fully, the suggested reading order follows the chronology of the novels' internal world rather than their publication order: Tracks (1912–1924), The Master Butchers Singing Club (1918–1950s), Love Medicine (1934–1984), The Beet Queen (1932–1972), Tales of Burning Love (1994), The Bingo Palace (1990s), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (1912–1996), The Plague of Doves (1911–2001). This order gives the fullest portrait of the historical arc of Ojibwe life in North Dakota.
What is love medicine in the novel?
In the novel's opening section, Lipsha Morrissey — a young Ojibwe man on the reservation — tries to make a love medicine (a traditional charm) to revive his grandparents Nectar and Marie Kashpaw's marriage, which has been threatened by Nectar's obsession with Lulu Lamartine. Unable to procure the goose hearts that the traditional recipe requires, he substitutes frozen turkey hearts and fails to have them blessed; Nectar chokes on the turkey heart and dies. Love medicine in the novel is both a literal practice (the traditional Ojibwe love charm) and a metaphor for all the imperfect attempts that the novel's characters make to create or restore love: the love that Lipsha feels for his family, the love that Marie has devoted her life to, the love that Lulu has given freely to everyone who wanted it. The novel's central irony — that the love medicine kills rather than heals — is also the novel's central argument: that the desire to restore what has been lost cannot be accomplished by traditional or modern means alone, and that love in the novel's world is always entangled with loss, failure, and the damage of the history that surrounds it.
How does Love Medicine portray reservation life?
Love Medicine is one of the few major works of American literary fiction to portray contemporary Native American reservation life from inside a Native family's experience rather than from the perspective of an observer or anthropologist. Erdrich's portrait is unsentimental about the poverty, alcoholism, and dysfunction of reservation life while also being deeply invested in the specific culture, humor, spirituality, and community bonds that sustain the families she depicts. The novel does not romanticize traditional Ojibwe life as a pure alternative to American modernity, nor does it treat the reservation as simply a site of damage; instead it shows a community that is adapting, imperfectly and often painfully, to conditions that were imposed on it by a century of US government policy. The novel's use of multiple narrators — fourteen different voices across the linked stories — allows Erdrich to show the reservation community from multiple perspectives simultaneously, giving a fuller portrait than any single viewpoint could provide.
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