Anyway, said Josette, edging around the table, still holding her cake spatula. You can quit the National Guard now, right?
No way, he said, surprised. I signed the papers.
Oh, Hollis.
Josette was staring straight ahead, standing next to him, and her voice was the voice of a woman.
Acknowledgments
RITA GOURNEAU ERDRICH, my mother, mentioned an Ojibwe family who allowed parents enduring the loss of a child to adopt their child—a contemporary act that echoes an old form of justice. Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Dad, Ralph Erdrich, for thirty-five years of National Guard drills. Thank you, Persia, for teaching Ojibwe immersion to a new generation of LaRoses; Pallas, for your close readings and constant cheer; Aza (see below); and Kiizh, Nenaa’ikiizhikok, Sky Woman, for calmly fixing our world. Thank you, Richard Stammelman; Dr. Sandeep Patel; James and Krista Botsford; Brenda Child; David Gizinski; Preston McBride; Jin Auh; Terry Karten, my editor; and Trent Duffy, my copy editor.
My grandfather Patrick Gourneau, Aunishinaubay, attended Fort Totten Indian Boarding School and Wahpeton Indian School. All his life, he wrote in his trained and beautiful script. Aza Erdrich used his boarding-school handwriting when she designed the cover of this book. In doing this, she connected us all with her great-grandfather and his great-aunt, our ancestor, the original LaRose.
About the Author
LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota, with her daughters, and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
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Also by Louise Erdrich
NOVELS
Love Medicine
The Beet Queen
Tracks
The Bingo Palace
Tales of Burning Love
The Antelope Wife (1997; revised editions, 2012, 2014)
Antelope Woman (2016)
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
The Master Butchers Singing Club
Four Souls
The Painted Drum
The Plague of Doves
Shadow Tag
The Round House
STORIES
The Red Convertible: New and Selected Stories, 1978–2008
POETRY
Jacklight
Baptism of Desire
Original Fire
FOR CHILDREN
Grandmother’s Pigeon
The Birchbark House
The Range Eternal
The Game of Silence
The Porcupine Year
Chickadee
Makoons
NONFICTION
The Blue Jay’s Dance
Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country
Credits
COVER DESIGN BY AZA ERDRICH
Copyright
Nothing in this book is true of anyone alive or dead.
LAROSE. Copyright © 2016 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of The New Yorker, where portions of this novel were published in slightly different form as “The Flower.”
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-227702-2
EPub Edition MAY 2016 ISBN 9780062277046
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Louise Erdrich, LaRose
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