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"I wonder who you are now, Nola said.
It's just me, said Peter, the same old me.
No it's not. We'll never be the same."

A miscalculated action. A misstep in the wrong direction. A side-eyed glance in one's vision.

With the last taste of summer on the horizon, Landreaux Iron steps out onto the very edges of his property in North Dakota in 1999. The majestic features of a well-muscled buck catches his eye and the automatic reflex in his trigger finger sets off a response for which there will never be a means of re-entry into gentler times. To his horror, Landreaux spots the body of his neighbor's son, Dusty, on the ground. A soon-to-be multi-dimensional grief will settle here.

Louise Erdrich weaves this thread of grief throughout her storyline. Grief is like the bird that lights softly upon the vines that slither through the chambers of the heart. Grief takes up permanent residence there. Grief makes not an occasional visitation. It is a deep, deep personal interaction with the reality of loss. If someone tells you that grief can be "shared", they are misguided. The language of grief is never spoken with quite the same exactness on the lips of a single soul.

If you have ever read any of Erdrich's books before, then you will know that they are not linear in nature. Her storylines create concentric circles within the depth of her fine characterizations. There is no artificial formula with this author. Her characters, and there are many here, pull the story in many directions from the revealing episodes of the long past into the sharpness of the present. These characters are complicated and their lives reflect the uneven pathways that they travel.

This novel is more than the telling of the unspeakable tragedy of that day and its impact on two families. It is an abundant treasure of how each of us, in our own way, are a composite of those who came before us and the absorption of that into our own life experiences. We are complicated beings. This is a complicated story that will most certainly involve you and draw you in.

Tread lightly. There is much to see, to feel, and to experience within these pages.