The Mighty Red
A Novel
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION
A Best Book of the Year: New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Kirkus, Harper's Bazaar
"A novel set in a small prairie community. . . that somehow also captures the world." — Parade
In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people’s lives.
In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, several lives revolve around a wedding fraught with desire, jealousy, and uncertainty. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed goth who can’t read her own future but will settle for fulfilling his. Her best friend, Hugo, a gentle, red-haired, homeschooled giant, also loves Kismet and is determined to steal her away and build a life together. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, drives a truck for Gary’s family, and on her nightly runs, tunes in to the darkness of late-night radio, experiences visions of guardian angels, and worries about what’s to come, for her daughter and herself.
The Mighty Red is Louise Erdrich at her consummate best. A novel of tender humor, disquietude, yearning, community, and family, it is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. Human time, deep time, Red River time, and geological time are explored alongside the impact of crises in our own time—climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the economic meltdown of 2008. It is a story about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This beautiful family drama by beloved author Louise Erdrich takes on themes of love and guilt with precision and warmth. While written through the point of view of many characters, the main story revolves around the mother-daughter duo of Crystal and Kismet—Crystal drives trucks for a beet farmer and Kismet is a sensitive teenager trying to find her place in their Native American community in North Dakota’s Red River Valley. In the aftermath of a terrible local tragedy and the apparent embezzling of a church renovation fund by a family member, Crystal and Kismet must navigate the anger and sorrow of their close-knit community while dealing with their own confusing and heartbreaking feelings, all of which lead to Kismet making a huge decision for what might be the wrong reasons. Erdrich writes with a poet’s crystal line economy, and we can easily visualize both the Red River Valley’s stunning natural beauty and its physical and spiritual impact on its residents. The Mighty Red is a powerful and moving novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Erdrich (The Night Watchman) follows the folks of the Red River Valley of North Dakota—the original home to the Ojibwe, the Dakota, and the Metis—in a captivating tale of love and everyday life amid environmental upheaval and the 2008 financial crisis. Crystal hauls sugar beets on the Geist family farm and counts her pennies while her partner, Martin, a failed actor who moonlights as a traveling arts teacher, spends money on impractical delights like salsa dancing. They share a daughter, Kismet, 18, who's reviled at her high school for being a goth until Geist scion Gary falls in love with her. Kismet initially rejects Gary, but she's softened by his persistence and agrees to marry him, a prospect Crystal opposes. Then there's Kismet's other suitor, Hugo, a bookish romantic who makes her laugh. At 16, Hugo plans to earn money in the fracking oil fields and save enough to steal Kismet away. The plot thickens when Martin disappears along with the local Catholic church's renovation fund and when reports surface of a bank robber named the Cutie Pie Bandit, who earns their name for being disguised as characters like Rasputin. Threaded throughout the book are references to a tragic accident that ultimately resolves in a satisfying conclusion. Along the way, Erdrich digs deep into the effects of crop farming, pesticides, and the destruction of topsoil on the characters' livelihoods. Erdrich excels at the slow simmer, and once again she delivers a deliciously seductive masterwork.
