The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

In The Blue Jay's Dance,Louise Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction, she brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and the insights, the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions she experienced in the course of one twelve month period—from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to fall a return to writing. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and small events that mothers—parents—everywhere will recognize and appreciate.

In The Blue Jay's Dance,Louise Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction, she brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and the insights, the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions she experienced in the course of one twelve month period—from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to fall a return to writing. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and small events that mothers—parents—everywhere will recognize and appreciate.

Detroit Free Press

What Erdrich does so masterfully is tie together all the strings of her life—as a mother and a wife, as a writer, as a creature of nature, as a human being without profound thoughts. All these strings tie her to the rest of us.

Though her books are fictional, Louise Erdrich is contributing an evocation of Native American history that has been all too absent from our literature. Rambling across centuries and populating her books with quirky, intense characters, Erdrich creates bittersweet family sagas.