4.5 stars. This book really surprised me by how much I enjoyed reading it. I was propelled through it in only two days! I loved the warmth of the characters, especially the two strong female protagonists, as well as the explorations of nature and human relationships. I found it funny and touching at different points and really enjoyed the interweaving of Native American beliefs. Well worth a read!

There should be a word for the feeling you get when you discover a book you love by a new-to-you author and realise they have a substantial backlist for you to devour. That’s my happy experience on reading The Mighty Red.

Kismet is about to finish high school in rural North Dakota and is looking forward to college. She is spending a lot of time with clever, nerdy Hugo, whose eccentric parents allow him to home-educate himself on a computer in his basement. However she somehow, almost accidentally, finds herself engaged to Gary, the one-time school football hero who is now under a cloud following a traumatic event for the community.

Meanwhile Kismet’s parents are living almost separate lives. Her father, Martin, is creative, whimsical and self-indulgent, pursuing his dreams as an underemployed actor, while her mother, Crystal, is also creative but has to give all her ingenuity to keeping the family – working gruelling night-shifts hauling sugar beets to the processing plant and practising small economies. Then Martin ups and disappears – and so does the church renovation fund, which he was supposedly investing on behalf of the priest.

At the heart of The Mighty Red are Kismet and Crystal, and how they respond to the two big events – Kismet’s marriage and Martin’s betrayal. You might think you’ve heard all this before. Kismet’s romantic dilemma is the classic jock versus nerd, and Crystal is a strong woman abandoned by a wastrel. (I’ve been reading a lot of Trollope lately so both premises feel very familiar.) However, what unfolds is more nuanced than I expected and includes a few surprises. And while the book deals with dark themes, there’s also some fun along the way!

The Mighty Red is set against the backdrop of the financial crisis of 2008, and the increasing use of GM crops by farmers. The narrative spools out from the family to tell the story of a community, a society and a place. There’s some beautiful writing about the North Dakota landscape, and its history, even as it is under threat. The sugar industry, it turns out, is not just destroying our health, it’s also destroying the land.

In the daily intrigues of a small town, we see individuals striving to make moral choices in a world where corporations face no such constraints. The Mighty Red depicts people in crisis in an economy and a climate on the brink, but there are green shoots of resilience and redemption.

I am a recent fan of Louise Erdrich. I have not read her classic oeuvre, but I have enjoyed both The Night Watchman and The Sentence immensely. I was thrilled to be approved for an ARC of her latest novel. In some ways, The Mighty Red is very similar to other Erdrich novels I've read in terms of style and content, and in some ways it is quite different. We follow a cast of characters orbiting around Kismet, a teenager with Indigenous ancestry, such as her mother, her two love interests, their families, friends and neighbours. Nominally, the plot focuses on Kismet's marriage to Gary, a jock struggling to process an accident in which some of his friends died, but this novel is really not about the plot. It is a series of character studies and a holistic portrait of a North Dakota community which views Fargo is an aspirational big city where things happen.

Erdrich's confident prose alone is enough to make this a worthwhile read. The more darkly humorous tone than some of her other novels invokes the Coen Brothers' movie it is in a sort of dialogue with. However, it is more subtle and less overtly focused on the politics of indigeneity than The Night Watchman and the Sentence (although it shares a focus on a local bookshop with the latter). Environmentalism and the politics of food are more at the forefront of this one. A large portion of the novel is dedicated to the land, the soil, and agricultural developments. Some of the anti-pesticide sections reminded me of My Year of Meats, although Erdrich is slightly less preachy than Ozeki. Having said this, most of the narrative is about the specific characters, The Mighty Red is far from a thinly disguised essay about food production.

Reading this novel is akin to seeing the world with glasses about 0.5 dioptres stronger than you need. Everything is a little bit skewed, a little bit off and a little bit too intense. Kismet's decision to marry Gary for no particular reason, Winnie's drugging of her dogs, Hugo's experiences of labour out of state, not to mention Martin's bank robbing escapades, all left me perplexed but unable to look away. The satire and the absurd are just slight enough for all the characters to still feel real whilst leaving the situations feeling distinctly unreal.

When we finally do get to what happened on the fateful night of the accident, all bets are off, though. I've read plenty of gory books before, but Erdrich's masterful evocation of the realities of the snowmobile accident affected me deeply and made it hard to read those chapters. I wish Charley either got more attention in the text, or his single POV chapter was not in it, as he has one of the most profound stories which did not get any time to be explored properly.

If you love Louise Erdrich, you will read this regardless of what I say, so the conclusion is for people new to her craft. Some might call this book somewhat unfocused. It reminded me of Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch, which it shares some of the strengths and weaknesses with. Erdrich is a more experienced writer and her prose is stronger, so if you liked what TRH tried to do but were disappointed in the execution, I would recommend The Mighty Red. Definitely the kind of book I was thinking about re-reading as I was reading it for the first time.

Thank you NetGalley and Hachette/Corsair for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love Louise Erdrichs’ writing and have read most of her books. I was delighted to be given the chance to read The Mighty Red. It didn’t disappoint.
Reading Louise Erdrich writing is like reading poetry, her writing flows along. The Mighty Red is about ordinary people and love and circumstances that sometimes we have no control over. I absolutely loved it and highly recommend it.
Thank you to Netgalley for the opportunity to read and share this book.

As usual with Louise Erdrich, the reader gets something that little bit different.
Because she is a poet as well as a novelist her descriptions are more poetic.
I lost count of the number of times in this book when I was stopped in my tracks following one of her expressions/descriptions as I marvelled at its beauty.
The intertwined stories in the book were easy to follow even though the worlds portrayed were strange (and interesting) for the British reader.
I loved this book.
I still have a few of Louise's books to read, which I am very much looking forward to, and I also hope to see more books by her in the future.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

'The Mighty Red' is set among ordinary people living in the valley of the Red river in North Dakota, a rural area full of sugar beet farms. Kismet Poe is a young woman who finds herself reluctantly marrying Gary - rich, handsome and traumatised by an accident that killed two of his friends. Kismet doesn't particularly want to be Gary's wife, but circumstances somehow conspire against her. The relationship and marriage form perhaps the centre of the story, but it's really an ensemble piece with multiple characters all with their own stories. There's Kismet's father, who disappears on the eve of her wedding together with the church restoration fund; her hardworking mother Crystal; her awful but rather pitiful mother-in-law; Gary, who isn't the carefree 'jock' everyone imagines; and Hugo, the boy she should have married instead. Plus many more.

Erdrich is one of those authors who can write in a style that is both 'literary' and easy to read. Her style and subject matter reminds me of popular US author Anne Tyler. It's rare I read a book where I loved every character - even the ones whose behaviour isn't always ideal. I wanted to hate Kismet's in-laws, but I couldn't - and neither could she. In fact, whilst I was shouting at the character to just pull out and not go through with a wedding she clearly didn't want, I could also imagine myself ending up in the same pickle. The nice thing about liking all the characters is that it makes you feel better about human life in general.

There is also a subplot around the impact of intensive farming on nature, with insects and birds disappearing as pesticide use increases and the soil on the beet farms becoming more and more degraded. This acted as a good counterpoint to the human dramas and is an important topic to be reminded of, particularly as rural issues like this can be somewhat hidden to city dwellers like me.

I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys reading good books with good characters - and really, who doesn't? It might not make me want to go and be a sugar beet farmer, but it does make me want to read up everything else by Erdrich that I can get my hands on!

Another melancholy book from Louise Erdrich. While I recognize the author as a brilliant writer, the theme of this book seems to be that happiness is for the privileged, most of the characters in The Mighty Red simply survive

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich is about love and making mistakes and neighbours, family and community.