The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year
Author(s): Louise Erdrich
An exhilarating and enchanting meditation on becoming a mother from one of America's most acclaimed writers, and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2012.
'She is a winter-spring baby, and all day there is just her, me, snow and the birds outside.'
A mother for all seasons, Erdrich tracks the end of her pregnancy into the dazzling light of childbirth and beyond into her baby's infancy, keeping a weather-eye on Nature outside her window and inside her body, gauging its lessons and constraints. She spills over with the intense feeling a baby carries into being as its gift to its mother. But her book is no mystical trip; Erdrich is umbilically attached to the earth, and to common sense. All prospective and seasoned parents will cherish her report from the frontline, for she never lectures, she simply strives to record exactly - in language both supple and ripe. Moving and memorable, neither handbook nor tract, here, for perhaps the first time, is mothering converted into writing without fakery.
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"Observant, tender and honest."-- New York Times Book Review
"Erdrich writes against the domestic, against the history of clich's the subject of birthing a baby is certainly burdened with. . .against this culture's infantilization of women before, during and after giving birth, against the secrets kept--the terror of and hunger for the deepest physical attachment--Erdrich holds up an articulate strength. Moving, memorable. . .A book that breaks ground."--Boston Sunday Globe
"What Erdrich does so masterfully is tie together all the strings of her life--as a mother and a wife, as a writer, as a creature of nature, as a human being without profound thoughts. All these strings tie her to the rest of us."--Detroit Free Press
"Pregnancy, birth and caring for an infant inspire Erdrich's reflections on being a woman, a mother and a writer in this affecting memoir of a daughter's first years. Erdrich transforms the mundane into a paean to the mystery and wonder of the creative force, and a celebration of family, and wonder of the creative force, and a celebration of family, nature and memory."-- People magazine
Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of many novels, the first of which, "Love Medicine", won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the last of which, "The Round House", won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. She lives in Minnesota.
General Fields
- :
- : HarperCollins Publishers
- : 0.204
- : 31 January 2010
- : 201mm X 132mm X 18mm
- : United States
- : books
Special Fields
- : black & white illustrations
- : black & white illustrations
- : 240
- : 813.54
- : English
- : Paperback / softback
- : Louise Erdrich