The Painted Drum

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

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.