Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Shadow Tag

Shadow Tag
Shadow Tag
Author: Louise Erdrich
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Paperback
reviewed on + 166 more book reviews


Louise Erdrich writes with honesty, courage, tenderness, and sometimes dark humor about Native American people: families, communities, youth,parents, in ways that resonate with all of us. Shadow Tag strips a family to its core, the entangling love, the cruelty, the petty revenges that make the reader cringe. A husband who is an iconic painter with a national reputation, the wife who has been his muse and subject, but now feels trapped in their relationship, and three children who seemed tossed by the storm of their household, trying in their naïveté to make plans for survival. Beautifully written, but dark in its unflinching honesty, the book closes with tragedy but hopefulness for the future of the survivors.