FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD

Louise Erdrich Erdrich’s previous two books have been compelling stories about native Americans whose lives bridge cultures old and new, where opioid addiction is rife but so are the rites of the sweat lodge. This starts out the same, with Mary Potts, aka Cedar Hawk Songmaker, on a journey to meet her Ojibwe birth mother and to tell her she is pregnant. In the background are odd, discordant hints of social breakdown whose source, we slowly learn to our horror, is an evolutionary reversal in which women no longer giving birth, or if they do the babies die. In a dystopian twist eerily reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, martial law is enforced and Cedar is captured and put in a cell. It turns into a thriller and for me, disappointingly so. Rating: