Will I love The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse?

I’ve read and deeply admired nearly everything Erdrich has written, from Love Medicine to The Roundhouse. Erdrich’s language is always incantatory, and her stories are full of magic, landscape, and history. But this one is my absolute favorite. Even the title is amazing!

The story moves back and forth across the decades, and characters shift and transform before your eyes. Erdrich reminds me of Faulkner or even Homer; though deeply rooted in the lives and experiences of the Ojibwe communities of eastern North Dakota, Erdrich’s novels have a timeless, mythic feel. 

Picking out one of this master storyteller’s plethora of great reads is nearly impossible, but this 2002 novel features Father Damien Modeste, a woman who has lived as a man on the remote Ojibwe reservation of Little No Horse. The gripping plot takes a turn amid an investigation into a potentially phony saint named Sister Leopolda.

Erdrich also won a Pulitzer for her 2020 novel, The Night Watchman, but my favorite of her novels is this 2009 publication, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. The story centers around a nun who assumes the identity of a priest whose body she discovers on her way to a monastery where he’s been given the assignment of serving the Ojibwe Tribe on the Little No Horse Reservation. Louise contributed to an anthology I edited about the same time this novel came out, and I was so blown away by the writing that I sent her… show more.

Poetic and mystical, The Last Report on The Miracles at Little No Horse is a fusion of unsentimental realism and profound spirituality. Possibly one of my favourite books ever, the novel is multi-themed, philosophical, and rich in both imagery and wisdom. Not so much about a loss of faith as about transcending the veils of misunderstanding complicating the connection between our human lives and Divine Love, this robust story superbly blends life and death, passionate love with deep sorrow, and the spiritual with the earthly. Perhaps because I live in a country with 11 (eleven!) official languages, the Native American… show more.