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The Game of Silence

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No one becomes a children's librarian in the hopes of someday striking it rich. We all do it for our separate, twisted, obscure little reasons that probably have their roots somewhere in our youth. I did it partly because I realized that I wasn't cut out to be an archival librarian (the moment of inspiration came when my husband pointed out that I'd set my coffee cup down on my conservation textbook) and partly for two little words: readers advisory. I love recommending good books to good readers. I love recommending good books to bad readers. I love recommending good books period. And if I were to calculate the most frequently cited question I get on the children's room floor it might be, "My child loves the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. What else can you recommend?". Now until now my instinct was to grab "The Birchbark House" by Louise Erdrich and thrust it into the waiting patron's arms. Now, unfortunately, I have a choice to make. "The Birchbark House" is good, yes. But its sequel, "The Game of Silence" is even better. How can I go about not recommending the sequel before its predecessor? I can't. Just the same, "The Game of Silence" does not absolutely require that "The Birchbark House" be read in order to understand the following story. It stands on its own beautifully and it shouldn't be any wonder to anyone that it garnered itself the 2006 Scott O'Dell Award for historical fiction. It undoubtedly deserved it.

Having survived the smallpox plague of 1847, Omakayas still mourns the loss of her little baby brother, but keeps her spirit strong. Good thing too. A band of raggedy homeless people have arrived in the girl's Ojibwe camp and her good tribe takes them in immediately. Amongst the people is a baby, its mother long gone, and the perfect remedy for the hole in Omakayas's family's heart. Word has reached the tribe that the white settlers are forcing all Native Americans to move farther west despite a treaty made years ago. To verify the truth behind this rumor and to see whether it was the whites who broke their word or the Natives, four men are sent from the camp to discover the truth. In the time that it takes the men to get back (the span of one year) we watch Omakayas's adventures and traditions. As time goes one, however, it becomes clear that change is imminent and that Omakayas must allow herself to go into the woods to seek the spirits that have given her so much knowledge in the past. What she sees may make all the difference in how she lives the rest of her life.

Though I'd enjoyed "The Birchbark House" I was reluctant to read its sequel immediately. No matter how well read a children's librarian might be, it's very difficult to voluntarily read books in a genre that you yourself avoided like the plague as a child. In my case, historical fiction. I decided not to read this book simply because I'd read the first one and probably knew exactly what to expect with this sequel. Then it started appearing on all the Best Books of the Year lists. And then Roger Sutton (editor of Horn Book Magazine) started singing its praises to the skies. About the time people started murmuring the words "Newbery" and "Game of Silence" in the same breath I knew I had to give in and read it. Thank God for that. Having honed her skills already on everything from picture books to adult novels, Erdrich has sketched out a perfect tale. Characters grow and change and know one another better by the story's end.

I've always had a weakness for Erdrich's pencil illustrations, thinking them as essential a complement to her stories as Garth Williams's were to the "Little House" books. In this story Erdrich uses them to their fullest effect. Pinch, Omakayas's mischievous little sprite of a brother, is rendered here in all his round spiky-haired cheerfulness. Though he annoys those he loves past all endurance, you're just as enamored of the little guy as his doting mother and frustrated (but amused) siblings. There was one picture in the batch that I found a mite bit confusing, of course. In the chapter "Fish Soup" we see a picture of Twilight (Omakayas's cousin) gutting a fish with her hair in two pigtails above her head. Oddly enough, she seems to be wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt of a particularly modern design. It's a cute little image but if the shirt isn't made of 100% cotton then Erdrich probably should have made that clearer. As it stands it seems like a very odd discrepancy in the midst of otherwise historically accurate pictures.

In every novel there's an odd little moment here or a word there that strikes the reader as funny. For me it was the moment when Old Tallow, the warrior woman who hunts with a pack of trained dogs at her side, says that when she fell down a cliff she, "pitched ears over butt all the way to the bottom". Butt? Interesting word choice there. Still, it gets the message across. And for every little quirk in the tale there are three times as many small instances of writing perfection. As Old Tallow has a rotted finger chopped off and scalded closed (it sounds more violent than it actually plays out) Omakayas sees only a single tear fall from the woman's eye. Later, the girl, "wished she'd caught that tear. It was rare. Probably, it was the only tear Old Tallow had ever shed". Even better are sections that discuss Pinch's fish catching skills. Though his traps look like beavers' nests and his decoy the oddest shaped fish anyone has ever seen, time and again Pinch catches more fishies than anyone else. "The fish that Pinch carved was apparently the most delicious-looking fish in the world". In this way Erdrich weaves that ever necessary thread of loving humor into her books. You can be meaningful all day and bore children to tears or you can dot the text with funny and very real moments of childhood and end up with an even better book. Erdritch opts for the latter.

Here's what I love about the stories of Omakayas. They're actually interesting to kids. There are great snowball fights, snow houses, contests, and examples of kids playing in realistic ways. At the same time they're historically accurate and though they never downplay the horror of colonization, neither do they wallow in misery and woe. These books show characters proud of their ancestry who are precious to their readers because they seem so very real. People complain all the time about how depressing good books are to kids sometimes (ala "The Bridge to Terebithia"). Fine. Let's have them all read "The Game of Silence" in school instead. You'd be hard pressed to find a book half as wise and a quarter as amusing. I could probably go on and on and on about it (which is a relief after reviewing some books that take all my energy to find words to describe) but I'll just leave you with the knowledge that this is undoubtedly one of the best books to come out in years and years. A bloody brilliant piece of work.

When it comes to stories of the Ojibwe people, it seems to this reader/listener that Louise Erdich writes not only with her pen but also with her heart. A native of North Dakota, Erdrich is of German-American/Chippewa descent, and she is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. Thus, her novel "The Birchbark House," which introduced young Omakayas, glistened with insight and admiration for characters who lived in the 1850s.

The same may be said of "The Game of Silence," beautifully delivered by voice actress Anna Fields.

Now, of course, Omakayas is older and she has learned a great deal as she goes about her days among her people, all following the shifting seasons. There have been changes: a sister has found someone to love, and Omakayas becomes aware that she possesses a unique gift - her dreams foretell the future.

As the story opens, days are peaceful on a Lake Superior island. The people live in houses made of birchbark during the summer, then as the days grow cooler they prepare for harvest. When winter falls all will leave their birchbark houses for cedar cabins close to a town, LaPointe.

However, the Ojibwe's serenity is interrupted by white men who want them to leave the island, want to push them away from the land they call home.

Intended for young listeners, those in grades 5 through 8, "The Game of Silence" will not only offer them a wealth of historical detail but also a reminder of the beauty and bounty of nature.

- Gail Cooke

Over the years, the focus of Louise Erdrich's writing has been her Indian heritage of the Upper Midwest. Her childhood was shaped by attending a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in North Dakota where her parents taught (mother was of French-Ojibwe descent and father was of German stock). Her early novels ("Love Medicine" --1984 and "Tracks" --1988) told stories of the Chippewa tribe in North Dakota before she wrote of her Ojibwe tribe in Minnesota in fiction ("The Antelope Wife" --1998) and in a travel memoir ("Books And Islands in Ojibwe Country -- 2003).

Now she is writing a multi-volume children's epic of the history of her people as seen by through the eyes of Omakayas, a pre-teen Ojibwe girl growing up in the pre-Civil War Minnesota. The first book of the series, "The Birchbark House" (1999) explored the pre-Eden world (i.e. before the arrival of the white settlers) that was still dangerous, especially with the introduction of smallpox. Now the second novel, "The Game of Silence" continues that history with the coming encroachment of the American government.

Not least among its charms is the expose to the Ojibwe ways/culture/mindset of a day long ago. The pencil drawings by the author give a visual image to a world that will not be familiar to most. The writing is simple but clear, driven by the story of an approaching doom that has yet to arrive. Teenagers and adults will enjoy this story and look forward to future installments of the adventures of Omakayas and her people.

When Louise Erdrich's THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE was published in 1999, it was widely hailed as an alternative to the beloved "Little House" series, exploring roughly the same time period and same geographical area as that covered by Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels. Much like the "Little House" books, THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE documented the traditions, celebrations, joys, and sorrows of an ordinary family. In Erdrich's novel, though, this family is part of an Ojibwe community rather than a group of white pioneers.

Readers who came to know Omakayas, the heroine of THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE, have been waiting a long time to find out what happens next to this vibrant, likeable character and her family. The good news is that the sequel, THE GAME OF SILENCE, is finally here, and it was definitely worth waiting for.

THE GAME OF SILENCE opens with a dramatic scene that sets the theme of much of the rest of the novel. Omakayas's small community is shocked by the arrival of strangers, other native peoples who have been displaced by chimookomanag, or white people. Frightened, half-starved and angry, the survivors become part of Omakayas's life, and their harrowing stories instill fear and anxiety into everyone's hearts. Could they be the next to lose their homes? Erdrich writes, "They would all fear to lose something huge, something so important that they never even knew that they had it in the first place. Who questions the earth, the ground beneath your feet? They had always accepted it --- always here, always solid. That something was home."

Omakayas worries about her home, too. She loves her family and the land where they live. She thinks, "If they ever had to leave, ...her heart might fall right out of her body to lie forever on the ground it loved." As the year wears on, though, Omakayas is troubled more and more by dreams, almost visions, that seem to ask her to do something she's not yet ready for. Can she ignore what seems to be her gift? Before the end of the novel, she must face her fears in order to lead her family on to the next chapter of their lives. Omakayas is still the sensitive, lively, sometimes impulsive girl of THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE, but in this novel she grows up quickly.

Although there are some big themes explored in THE GAME OF SILENCE, Erdrich still enriches her novel with the small details of everyday life that also made THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE so compelling. Over the course of a year, the patterns of Omakayas's life play out --- harvesting rice, smoking fish, telling stories, sledding on the snow, preparing for a wedding. These ordinary tasks are described in loving detail, enabling readers to gain a fuller picture of a time, a place, and a way of life. In addition, Erdrich offers a comprehensive glossary of Ojibwe terms and dozens of lovely pencil illustrations of the characters and their natural surroundings.

What emerges is a portrait of a family --- and a culture --- on the brink of change. Let's hope we don't have to wait as long again to discover what that change will mean for Omakayas and her people.

   --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

The Game of Silence by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, 2005); Where the Great Hawk Flies by Liza Ketchum (Clarion Books/Houghton-Mifflin, 2005).

Considering the depiction of Native Americans in books, so much has changed since I was the age of our twelve-year-old daughter.

In several new books for young readers, the narrative vantage point has been very decisively shifted to place native characters in the point-of-view position, in the center of events instead of serving as "colorful" parts of the scenery. I've recently read aloud to our daughter Lillian two new young adult novels with Native American themes, Louise Erdrich's The Game of Silence (HarperCollins, 2005) and Liza Ketchum's Where the Great Hawk Flies (Clarion/Houghton-Mifflin, 2005).

At about Lillian's age I read James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, and I strongly recall the ache I felt in response to Cooper's elegiac, grandly romantic evocation of the "noble" Chingachgook, who appeared to be in Cooper's view inseparable from the strange and sublime new American landscape. As an outdoorsy suburban Boy Scout, I couldn't help but see woodsman and trapper Natty Bumppo as an exemplary white ambassador to the Indians.

Along with Cooper's portrayal of close companionship between an immigrant frontiersman and aboriginal chieftain, I imbibed from that book a desolate, lump-in-the-throat sense of traditional Indians as an endangered species, remnants of a society too fragile to withstand the onslaught of the Europeans' well-armed civilizing force.

In the popular media, depictions of Native Americans continue to wobble or careen between positive (dignified, sensitive, stoic, ecological) and negative (brutal, aloof, lethal, voracious for alcohol), yet in contemporary literature for children and young adults, the native characters (as is also true of African Americans) are now usually portrayed in far more complimentary ways. While in all earnestness, some authors create stories that seem too didactic in seeking to compensate for the stereotypes of the past, these new books of Erdrich and Ketchum offer writing for younger readers that is enjoyable as well as challenging, and historically complex.

Erdrich is the author of nine novels for adults, two collections of essays, and three collections of poetry along with two children's books and a previous young adult novel, The Birchbark House (nominated for a National Book Award in 1999), to which the new novel The Game of Silence is a sequel.

It's not easy to summarize the differences between the volcanically talented Erdrich's books for adults and those for younger readers. The former are more erotic and more violent, with a fabulous flexibility about conventional definitions of "realism," and an intensely metamorphic use of language, with surges of imagery born in dreams and hallucinations. Yet in other respects Erdrich's way of crossing the page is unmistakable, in any genre.

As Lillian pointed out when I asked her about what makes a good young adult novel, the most obvious difference is that the narrator -- the active, witnessing consciousness of a story's events -- is usually a child or teenager. The tenor and tempo of the narrator's voice is therefore different, and in a successful young adult novel the voice is convincing, evocative and flushed with personality, not an adult's idea of how younger people sound.

Erdrich's young adult books are never simplistic as they explore tremendously difficult experiences, including European-borne epidemics, which decimated native communities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It's certainly noteworthy that when writing for younger readers Erdrich never resorts to a "special" tone or style, like certain adults who adopt condescending mannerisms when talking to kids. The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence are as serious in scope and as beautifully written as any reader of Erdrich's adult books would hope.

As with its predecessor, the setting of The Game of Silence is a mid-nineteenth-century Ojibwe community on an island in the lake Gitchi-Igaming, eventually known as Lake Superior. In both books, the main character is Omakayas (or Little Frog, "because her first step is a hop"), who is idiosyncratic and multi-dimensional, like classic literary girls such as Brink's Caddie Woodlawn, Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Wilder's Laura and Mary, Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Betsy, and Alcott's March sisters in Little Women.

A substantial pleasure in Erdrich's Omakayas books is their portrayal of daily life among the Ojibwe, who are related in language and in their seasonal subsistence-cycle (summertime agriculture, autumn fishing and gathering, wintertime deer hunting, and spring maple-sugaring) to the Abenaki people of "Wabaniak" or northern New England and Quebec, our own region. While Omakayas and her family are beginning to see the ripple effects of changes in the east, for instance in the arrival of native refugees fleeing colonial seizure of their traditional homelands and the horrific diseases that precede the settlers themselves, readers are given at least a glimpse of the complicated societies that existed prior to the coming of Europeans.

Even more so than in The Birchbark House, in The Game of Silence Erdrich incorporates Ojibwe words and phrases, deftly translating them within her English sentences and also including a wonderful glossary that also can be read through for its own delights. As described in another of her recent books, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (National Geographic Directions, 2003), Erdrich has been painstakingly learning her ancestral language, and the steady presence of another language in The Game of Silence changes the sound, the texture, and the perspective of the story.

Another ingredient in classic literature for younger readers is illustrations, and like The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence features Erdrich's lovely pencil drawings, accompanying her image-rich prose as a visual counterpoint.

I first learned of Louise Erdrich and THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE from an article in one of my parenting magazines. The book was compared to those of the Little House series, which I LOVE, so I quickly bought the book and read it. Its sequel, THE GAME OF SILENCE, is just as good if not better.

The story picks up three years after the small pox winter of 1847 (in THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE). Omakayas's family and the rest of their Ojibwe tribe take in a tribe of friends and family members who have been displaced by the chimookomanag, or white men. This is just one of the many changes that Omakayas and her family will have to endure in this book. Word has reached the tribe that the white settlers are making all Native Americans move west even though a treaty concerning the land was put in place years before. Omakayas has also begun having important dreams and been feeling a strong push to go into the forest with a coal-blackened face for a four-day fast with the hope that the spirits will speak to her and give her guidance...something that she is not looking forward to doing.

What I love about THE GAME OF SILENCE and Louise Erdrich's writing is that reading historical fiction can be enjoyable. The reader comes away from the book with a greater understanding of the way of life, hardships, and traditions of this Ojibwe tribe. Plus, you can't help but fall in love with Omakayas and her family, even her bothersome brother, Pinch. I can't wait to start the next book in the series, THE PORCUPINE YEAR.

Omakakeyens. A young girl's name. A name that is a signpost that you are entering a way of life far from your own. Her days are filled with her family, their way of life within the pattern of the seasons, a relationship to all living and growing things around them.

This is the 2nd of what is now 3 books. First, Birchbark House where we first read of Omakakeyens, I think about 6 or 7 years old, and her Ojibwa family at the turn of the century. This book follows as she grows up in northern Minnesota, with the just released Porcupine Years as the story continues. They are filled with love and humor; you can put them down but you don't want to. I have all three to give my granddaughter, but not until I've read them.

Louise Erdrich gives sentences, paragraphs, that take my breath away. Her books are true treasures, deserving of all the awards they have received.

This is the sequel to The Birchbark House. Like its predecessor, it transpires in the Ojibwe tribe's mid 19th century home on one of the Great Lakes and on the family of Omakayas, the middle child of three `siblings'. (Siblings is like that because of what happened in Birchbark House.) Also like Birchbark House, this one is a charming blend of historical fiction and clear, lovingly drawn, appealing characters. A young reader will benefit greatly from seeing the westward movement of white people through Native American eyes, and do that within the context of a most enjoyable story with endearing characters and emotionally accessible events, plus they'll get a smattering of Ojibwe language and its culture. Well worth giving to your middle school reader.

The trick with historical fiction is balancing atmosphere and information with an engaging, moving storyline. Too much story can turn facts to fiction; but too much data can leave the reader overwhelmed and, yes, even bored. Unfortunately for Louise Erdrich, her novel slips a little too much into the latter category. "The Game of Silence," sequel to Erdrich's novel "The Brichbark House," has a good story, which follows young Omakayas and her family and others in the Ojibwe tribe who live in what will later be called Minnesota. They are peaceful and friendly to the chimookomanug or white people who live near them, but when the Ojibwe learn that many more white men are coming, they realize that their beloved home may be in danger. Omakayas must grow up quickly as all these new happenings begin to alter her life.

Omakaya's life is tragic yet hopeful, and always intriguing. But the story is bogged down in too much unfamiliar Ojibwe language, long nearly-unrelated background stories, and an episodic layout that, well, bored me a lot of the time. Pick up this book if you're really interested in the history and culture of Native American tribes in 1850, or if you'd like a different perspective on frontier life than the traditional "Little House on the Prarie" stories. Otherwise, this probably would be one novel you could pass by.

Reviewed by Beckie Sheffield for Flamingnet Book Reviews

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Preteen and young adult book reviews

I decided to read this book with my son because a chapter book his class was reading for school was filled with racist stereotypes of American Indians. I wanted a book that would offer him another, more realistic perspective and would give him a little perspective on how European colonialism affected the lives of the people who were here first, without traumatizing him, since this isn't the easiest thing to discuss with a child. He was very engaged with the novel from the beginning and had many questions about the characters and events in the book. I was worried that he would be uninterested because the main character is a girl (which happens with him sometimes in spite of my best efforts), but he had no issues with that. I highly recommend this book to parents who want to give their children a truer, more balanced perspective on American Indians.