A SONG OVER MISKWAA RAPIDS

Past and present collide and conspire in the northern Midwest.

In her third novel, Grover elaborates a narrative world involving multiple families rooted in Mozhay Point, a fictive Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota. The protagonists include Margie Robineau, who struggles to defend Sweetgrass, her family’s land allotment, from developers; Michael Washington, a tribal council member whose political fortunes are imperiled by the chance discovery of a moldy corpse; Dale Ann Dionne Minogeezhik, who has lived for decades with the burden of losing a child and failing to prevent her former lover’s death; and a group of mindimooyenyag-iban, the spirits of female elders who watch and occasionally intervene in the unfolding action. The book shifts between the present and decisive events a half-century earlier, revealing communities haunted by trauma yet sustained by ancestral connections. The past’s definitive power in the lives of individuals is skillfully rendered here, and the plot moves briskly and suspensefully toward its climax. Like many of the novels of Louise Erdrich, an obvious influence, this work generates much of its aesthetic force from the gradual revelation of its characters’ complex relations. Particularly effective are the interplay between the spirit elders and the living and the ultimate disclosure of the circumstances behind a young man’s ill-fated attempt to escape the misery he has created for himself and others. An elegant circularity in the storytelling reinforces a sense of historical spirals and the inevitable imbrication of all personal and communal fates. We encounter here, finally, a rich sketch of the endurance and achievements of the Aandakii Anishinaabeg, “the original, good people who had been created by the Great Spirit and gently lowered to the Earth. And then displaced to live elsewhere.”

A sprawling, poignant chronicle of struggle and survivance.