Customer Reviews

Dance Me Outside: More Tales from the Ermineskin Reserve

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a great collection of short stories. This is mainly written from the viewpoint of Silas, about the adventures if him and Frank, as well as a colourful collection of characters living on a reserve. These stories are mostly humourous, sometimes tragic, yet true to life. I enjoyed almost the whole book, however I did think the begining was somewhat slow. However, one does create a bond with the characters quickly and can share in their joy and pain! So on the whole - I will recommend this book as one not to miss.

This book remains on my top-ten reading list, due to Kinsella's hard hitting expression of life's many ironies, foibles and realities. Each fiction story is compelling and fast-moving; adeptly using humor, grief and affection to hit you with one of life's bitter-sweet truths. Each story has a couple lines near the end that quite subtly imply a moral to "tell it like it is." The easily-read stories have a few common characters to help with each different setting. This is Kinsella's best package of short stories -- which deserves to be reprinted. At least for this middle-aged guy, 'Dance Me Outside' is an excellent read.

Social commentary that makes for an interesting read. I found most of the stories very amusing, some very thought-provoking. Kinsella doesn't attempt to "candy-coat" or romanticize the experience of Native North Americans, but tells his stories in a very straightforward, and amusing, way. This is still one of my favourite books-I highly recommend the "sequels" as well!

My first Kinsella read. While the syntax takes a little getting used to I found that it was a quick, easy read. Usually I'm a slow reader but this took me no time in getting through. The characters are great. I've now just started THE FENCEPOST CHRONICLES also by Kinsella.

Everybody's used to sad insightful writing. Rarely do we find graceful funny twists on life's injustices. These short stories present a native view of a changing world that makes you remember home.
We are all familiar with the immigrant's stories; now, here are the natives, human, funny and enduring. As one who has lived on "the res", and heard the laughter of my family down the halls, I am thankful for these writings. As a baseball fan, I am unsurprised that these are given to us by the same man who presented Shoeless Joe to our hungry hearts.

Nonpareil calls this "more stories" because they are reprinting what was, in fact, Kinsella's first collection. It came off the presses while he was a grad student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1983, he spoke to bibliographer Ann Knight about the story "Caraway" in this collection, saying,

"My wife Mickey had an influence on this story. She was writing a tv script about an old woman whose daughter dies on the prairies under suspicious circumstances and the Catholic Church refuses to bury her in their cemetery.

"As I read it, I kept asking, 'What does she do with the body?' I suggested that she burn it in her front yard, and even went so far as to write the scene. It was never used in the teleplay and I was stuck with a coffin burning scene I had no use for.

"I don't like to waste any material, so I set about to create a story where there could be a coffin burning. I think the three paragraphs where I describe the coffin burning are the 'best' I have ever written."

All the stories in this collection (whose original 1977 Oberon hardcover edition is now a collector's item of considerable value) are as good as any of the hundreds that followed them.