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Title details for The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich - Available

The Painted Drum

by Louise Erdrich
Anna Fields
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available

When Faye Travers is called upon to appraise the estate of a family in her small New Hampshire town, she isn't surprised to discover a forgotten cache of valuable Native American artifacts. However, she stops dead in her tracks when she finds a rare drum-a powerful yet delicate object, made from a massive moose skin stretched across a hollow of cedar, ornamented with symbols and dressed in beads of brass and red tassels-for without touching the instrument she hears it sound. From Faye's discovery, we trace the drum's passage both backward and forward in time and discover how it changes the lives of those whose paths it crosses.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 2, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780792744429
      • File size: 256792 KB
      • Duration: 08:54:58

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The painted drum at the center of this lovely book is Ojibwe. It is found, radiating shamanic power, by estate appraiser Faye Travers. That Faye herself is Ojibwe is the first of many repeating motifs in this narrative of linked stories about the people whose lives have been changed for good or ill by the drum. Anna Fields's performance is a tour de force. She was coached in Ojibwe pronunciation and is as convincing as gruff Ojibwe Bernard Shaawano, whose grandfather made the drum, as she is portraying the light voices of the doomed girl children who haunt the book and the smoky timbre of an old Indian woman. Brava. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 27, 2005
      Though Erdrich's latest lyrical novel returns to Ojibwe territory (Four Souls
      ; Love Medicine
      , etc.), it departs from the concentrated vigor of her best work in its breadth of storytelling. Erdrich essays the grief that comes when the sins of parents become mortal for their children. Native American antiquities specialist Faye Travers, bereaved of her sister and father, ambivalently in love with a sculptor who has lost his wife and loses his daughter, stumbles onto a ceremonial drum when she handles the estate of John Jewett Tatro, whose grandfather was an agent at the Ojibwe reservation. Under its spell, she secrets it away and eventually repatriates it to that reservation on the northern plains—the home of her grandmother. The drum is revived, as are those around it. Gracefully weaving many threads, Erdrich details the multigenerational history surrounding the drum. Despite her elegant story and luminous prose, many of the characters feel sketchy compared to Erdrich's previous titans, and several redemptions seem too pat. But even at low voltage, Erdrich crafts a provocative read elevated by beautiful imagery, as when children near death fly off like skeletal ravens.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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