No matter the crime, we do not ever impose the death penalty. The logic is faultless that is what justice means in the US.īut not here in Australia. If the crime had taken place outside the reservation – if Geraldine had lied, and said that it had – then he would have been executed. Which means, to him, and probably to millions of Americans who would see nothing wrong with this book, that the rapist must be killed.

Joe’s thirteen-year-old sense of justice is outraged, and he determines to get justice for his mother. Joe’s father is a tribal judge, but he fails to bring the prosecution. She knows who he is he is clearly identifiable. The crime is clearly race-related and it was deliberately committed on the reservation so that he could not be prosecuted. Joe’s mother Geraldine is abducted, brutally assaulted, and raped, and when by chance she was able to escape she reeked of gasoline because her rapist was going to burn her alive. However, implicit in the storyline is a belief that justice requires capital punishment, a barbarity which places the United States out of step with Western values and conflicts with a strongly held value of mine. Let me cut to the chase: As she makes plain in the Afterword, Erdrich is on a mission with this book, a mission to make people aware that jurisdictional issues to do with native title on reservations mean that perpetrators of violent crime, especially rape against women, go unpunished. And if a book works so well that it bothers me to the extent that this one does, then it’s a very powerful book indeed. The book is a superbly crafted coming-of-age story, with a compelling plot and fine characterisation, especially of the teenage boys with their wisecracking humour. Louise Erdrich, a Native American author of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, is, Wikipedia tells me, acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. Let me say at the start that it is a very fine book. I was not expecting to feel like this, but I felt a deep sense of unease when I turned the last page of Louise Erdrich’s The Round House.

The round house louise erdrich reviews