Makoons by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Readable, Funny, and Moving, but the Least Satisfying Birchbark House Book So Far The fifth entry in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series about the mid-19th-century Ojibwa girl/woman Omakayas and her family, Makoons (2016), begins not long after the ending of the fourth, Chickadee (2012), with one of Omakayas’ eight-year-old twin sons, Makoons (Little Bear), still recovering from his illness caused by missing his beloved twin Chickadee when that boy was kidnapped and taken to the prairie far away from their Minnesota woods, lakes, and islands home. Though now the twins have been reunited on the prairie where the family relocated to recover Chickadee, Erdrich inserts ominous foreshadowing early on, as Makoons has a vision revealing that their family will never return to Minnesota and that the twins won’t be able to save everyone from some trouble. Most of the boys’ loving family is still present: mother Omakayas, father Animikiins, grandmother Yellow Kettle, grandfather Deydey, beautiful aunt Angeline and her husband Fishtail, happy go lucky uncle Quill, wise great-grandmother Nokomis, and tomboy with a vengeance second-cousin Two Strike. Bizheens, Omakayas’ beloved adopted baby brother from the second and third books in the series who should now be the teenage uncle of the twins, is still absent without any mention by the characters or explanation from the author. The novel depicts the boys learning to ride horses for buffalo hunting, which is how the family must support themselves on the prairie. For Makoons horseback riding is easy and natural, guiding his pony Whirlwind with his legs and teaching it to run at a buffalo skin without shying, while Chickadee repeatedly falls off his horse, until Uncle Quill gives him a better pony, which turns out to be vicious and willful, so the twins name it Sweetheart. Makoons and Chickadee observe the adults in their big family and small community hunting and rendering the buffalo (“the Generous Ones”) into useful meat and hides and other commodities. (One wonders how the adults could so quickly become such accomplished buffalo hunters and processors after having lived all their lives in the forests and islands back east.) The boys also watch the absurd antics of a muscular, handsome, and vain young man called Gichi Noodin, who likes to preen, pose, show off, brag, assume that every girl and woman admires him, and—to his cost—ignore buffalo hunting protocol. Erdrich must have decided that her children’s series should have child protagonists, and because the end of the third novel ended Omakayas’ girlhood, the series moved forward twelve years to focus on her twin sons. OK. But in the process of outgrowing her protagonist’s role, Omakayas lost her appealing and vivid personality as well as her gifts (affinity for bears, spirits, dreams, and visions). Now only her sons have such gifts, and her only distinctive personality trait is to ensure that her husband and twins are presentable by braiding their hair every morning. Erdrich, then, valorizes childhood as a special, more imaginative, sensitive, and interesting time in a person’s life. At the same time, Erdrich contrived to move Omakayas and her family from the forests and lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota onto the great plains, gaining thereby a new field of historical Native American life oriented around buffalo to write about (paralleling the move west of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family in The Little House on the Prairie books). She thrillingly depicts a Native American buffalo hunt and vividly describes what comes after, not hiding the butchery, blood, rendering, and flies. The fourth novel compellingly focuses on Chickadee being separated from his family and having to survive apart from them as he comes to appreciate his name, but here in the fifth book Makoons does not have such an interesting experience on which to center a story. Makoons, like Chickadee, feels like a real boy, desiring to participate in a buffalo hunt before he’s old enough and playing funny tricks on the clueless Gichi Noodin, but his role as protagonist is a strangely minor one, without much development or even a substantial portion of the point of view scenes relative to other characters like Chickadee and even an adopted buffalo calf. And Gichi Noodin’s story arc is much more compelling than Makoons’, as the egotistical buffoon learns to see other people instead of only himself. “Before, he’d seen only his own reflection in his mind, or the eyes of other people. Now he was truly looking at people.” Erdrich is great at writing scenes kids would enjoy, like one in which Gichi Noodin loses his pants during a buffalo hunt, and at poignant scenes, like one featuring the twins’ great-grandmother Nokomis. She writes a neat story within her story, when Omakayas tells one about a man who marries a bear woman and joins her people. But the novel feels less substantial, realized, and finished than the earlier books in the series, and I even started noticing some of Erdrich’s neat illustrations from earlier books being recycled into this one, like the drawing ostensibly showing a buffalo hide being scraped that originally illustrated little Omakayas scraping a moose hide, and even the central picture on the cover is not a new one showing Makoons as a boy but an old interior illustration from the first book in the series showing Omakayas as a girl greeting two bear cubs. Finally, Makoons ends on something of a cliffhanger involving the twins, a vision, and darkness, but I am running out of steam for reading the series and am not anxiously waiting for Erdrich to finish the sixth entry. I do highly recommend the first three books about Omakayas as a girl, starting with the wonderful The Birchbark House (1999). View all my reviews
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