Books like The Painted Drum CD by Louise Erdrich

Faye Travers, a New Hampshire resident, is called to assess an estate for an estate and finds an old collection of Native American artifacts, including a remarkable drum made of moose skin, cedar, and beadwork. The drum, heard reverberating without touching it, links her to her mother's Ojibwe ancestry and to the distant Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Through Bernard Shaawano’s narration, readers learn that the drum was crafted by an Ojibwe grandfather mourning a lost daughter, and that its presence has altered lives across generations. Faye’s own strained relationship with a sculptor and the loss of her sister echo the themes of mourning that thread the narrative. Erdrich interweaves these perspectives to illuminate how the memories of lost children disproportionately shape the lives of those left behind, and she captures their complex, rhythmic grief in richly sensory prose.

First publish date: 2005