One of NY Times 100 Notable books of 2017

A good book with a slightly monotonous ending however it conforms with most dystopian fiction so it makes sense!!!
A world where evolution is turning backwards it may be unrealistic but dystopian fiction doesn’t need to be realistic to convey how society deals with disruption and disaster. Also covers some real life themes such as adoption and explores some native american traditions! ( )

How do I rate this?

This book broke me. I am angry that I read it. Angry I did not check CWs. I laid in bed and sobbed after I finished it. Hope for humanity or any of the characters in this book was repeatedly teased and then relentlessly stripped away. It is the bleakest book I have ever read. Bleaker than Butler. Convinced me that humanity is a mistake and we should all be thrown into the sea. ( )

This book was bizarre in its premise but had moments of brilliance. I was not expecting yet another dystopian novel. In this one women are once again victimized in the near future as the United States becomes undone. Clearly there's a sense that global warming has played some part in the events, but the reverse biological evolution and religious totalitarianism were not even partly explained, leaving me somewhat dissatisfied. I also thought the character development came up short. The best writing was in the philosophizing, but that seemed too disjointed and almost gratuitous. Nevertheless, the story was interesting, but I expected more from a writer of Louise Erdrich's caliber. ( )

Louise Erdrich's book will receive the overused term 'dystopian fiction.' However, it is closer to work of post-colonial fiction, with the current trends of a culture and economy based on exploitation projected into the near future. One only has to read the novel's depiction of Thanksgiving. In this respect, Future Home of the Living God is consistent with the Erdrich catalog.

And while comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale may seem natural, Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God diverges in ways that should, in the way that good fiction does, inspire readers to pay closer attention to the movements happening just below the surface.

At an earlier time the evil envisioned by dystopias featured the work of an authoritarian regime. And while that exists here, the world lapses into chaos, created in part by questions a regime (it is intentionally unclear who that regime is – as if the curtain was pulled back to reveal a Wizard ill-prepared for the responsibilities of his power) designed to exploit but without any ability to create. In some ways as much Pynchon as Atwood.

The protagonist, Cedar, finds herself in a struggle to be human in a place that views her as a commodity with help in varying degrees, from her two families, one adopted and one biological.

In this environment rumors take the place of news and the offices one would think would be a part of this authoritarian government, like the Post Office and the National Guard, become at odds with it (sound familiar?). The traditional institutions attempt to preserve life while the new mixture of religion and law, the Church of the New Constitution attempts to preserve itself at any cost.

It is the old colonialist/capitalist mindset run amok, more horrifying because it is embedded in the minds of the citizens willing to turn each other in for food. The tension between the need to survive and the guilt over hurting fellow humans is shown on the faces and in the actions of the collectors, the postal workers, the medical staff. Even those who work in support of the regime find themselves used up.

Yet no one seems capable of breaking free of this idea that the commodification of people, especially women of child bearing age, is acceptable. Perhaps this mindset is summed up best in a late conversation between Cedar and her step-father Eddy who says “People sick for power have no song.” Which in one sense is a preference for the old, the human, the people who have been exploited time and time again by colonialists. But it is also a critique of the capitalism run amok in that it has no ability to create. It uses. A reality most horrifying in a hospital cemetery full of white crosses – those who did not survive childbirth - this system has no ability or interest in making birth safer, only in capturing those with an ability to survive it.

And it is this territory which Erdrich stakes out, a version that won’t go away with the defeat of one evil regime or tyrant, that moves into a more relevant, richer, more ambiguous story – one that is ultimately more horrifying. ( )