Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Thirteen pungent stories conjure a tender strangeness, set amid the woodcut-like drawings of the author’s daughter Aza Erdrich Abe. The much-valorized Erdrich has 19 novels to her credit, including the Pulitzer Prize–winningThe Night Watchman (2020) andThe Round House (2012), which received the National Book Award. This is only her second collection of short fiction, followingThe Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008. Eleven of the stories in that first batch eventually fleshed out into novels; the current book contains five pieces first published inThe New Yorker. That includes the title story, in which a girl, 8 as the tale begins, ponders the cruelty of captivity via a guard dog, Nero: “He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents.” The child considers Nero’s multiple escapes, tosses him gingersnaps, chronicles the decline of his “white wolf” beauty until he’s unrecognizable except in the afterlife. The twinning of animals and children is an Erdrich trademark, marbling her fiction with a generous earthiness. The child narrating “Amelia,” a stand-out entry, survives poverty and loneliness and waitressing (another Erdrich signature) partly through the friendship of an older bachelor, and in doing so defies their town’s low expectations, as he did. Erdrich, bard of the Upper Midwestern landscape, writes of a school bus full of kids caught in a lethal snowstorm, “The wind toyed with the bus, sometimes booming at its sides, sometimes sliding with a low whistle along the window tops. At times, it reached below the hood and shook the engine like a baby’s toy rattle.” These stories stray across decades and continents, include a Venetian vampire and a woman whose central relationship is with a mysterious stone. The two speculative stories set in a disembodied future are less successful but still contain clever reversals. And the stunning “December 26,” the most tragic tale, is leavened by a “very dear little baby with a jubilant attitude and a topknot.” A wise and uncanny roux of Erdrich’s storytelling. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.