Love Medicine Analysis

The less-than-postcard-perfect setting kind of mirrors the themes and situations going on in the novel, putting some flashes of beauty and happy times amidst a sea of sadness. When Albertine looks...

Take a deep breath before plunging into this icy river of narrative technique mayhem. The narrative structure pretty confusing and complex, switching between the first-and third-person narration th...

The story is all about the Kashpaw family and its various friends and foes, so it's not hard to tag Love Medicine as a family drama. Obviously, the political and cultural backdrop is pretty importa...

Erdrich's descriptions of the setting pretty much embody the whole tone of the book: a lot of bleakness with a few flashes of nice stuff. In the Albertine's description of the Kashpaw family home,...

Since the narration pulls a switcheroo between each chapter, the style changes pretty dramatically throughout the book depending on who's "speaking." For example, when Lipsha Morrissey is speaking,...

The whole concept of "love medicine" kind of sounds Hogwarts-y to us, so we're totally into it—sign us up for Potions so we can make some for ourselves.Seriously, though, even though we're not ta...

Despite the overall bleak tone of the book overall, the ending is actually kinda-sorta happy: Lipsha has just bonded with his Daddy and come to terms with his parentage (after spending most of the...

(3) Base Camp Although the narrative jumps around in time quite a lot—and moves in and out of a lot of different people's minds—Erdrich makes the temporal and character shifts really easy to fo...

June Is the Cruelest MonthThe book opens with the final hours of June Kashpaw, who's wandering around Williston, North Dakota, waiting for a bus home. However, instead of making her bus, she ends u...

Falling StageJune Kashpaw, who apparently has had kind of a rough life anyway, goes on a drunken tear with a stranger and ends up dying while walking home in the middle of a storm. Her family (and...

We don't have too much backstory yet, but we can tell early on that there is tons of pain running under of the surface of the Kashpaw family. The book opens with some details of June Kashpaw's fina...

The book has undergone some nip tucks in its most recent edition. For example, two stories ("Lyman's Luck" and "The Tomahawk Factory") were chopped out. (Source)Louise Erdrich was part of Dartmouth...

There's actually quite a bit of sex in the book—and no, not all of the racy stuff has to do with the oh-so-alluring Lulu Lamartine. In addition to the sex scenes (one of which is pretty detailedâ...

Melville, Herman, Moby Dick (7.1.17-23, 7.1.153)Hayes, Ira (16.2.76)Kennedy, John F. (15.1.75)Nixon, Richard (9.1.36)Sitting Bull (10.1.22)The Battle of Iwo Jima (16.2.76)Vietnam (throughout)Zimbal...