There’s grieving here that, without being maudlin or sentimental, stays with you. Omakayas and her family struggle both with a merciless winter and an outbreak of smallpox, and though the book is perfectly appropriate for young adults, it’s not always easy reading. I actually wondered if they would be okay for my kids, who can be somewhat sensitive to ghost stories. Standing out for me right away were three stories-within-the-story that seem to be taken from native lore: “Deydey’s Ghost Story”, “Grandma’s Story: Fishing the Dark Side of the Lake”, and a creation story, “Nanabozho and Muskrat Make An Earth.” These stories by themselves would make it an outstanding book, and they’re not just for children: they are dark and resonant. I could see they were similar in many ways, but “Birchbark” quickly became for me something unique that stood on its own. I had read only one of the “ Little House” books by then (the third, “Little House On the Prairie”), so I could only make a limited comparison of the two series. I read “The Birchbark House” during that first quarantine summer. She grows up in the late 1840s and early 1850s more or less in the area that became Minnesota. The first three novels follow the childhood years of a girl, Omakayas, whose people are the Anishinabe (also known as Chippewa) they are sometimes referred to by the name of their language, Ojibwe. Louise Erdrich has a series of five young adult novels, together known by the title of the first book in the series, “The Birchbark House.”

My wife, who read all those novels as a child, suggested we look into a series of young adult novels told from the perspective of some Native American tribes that lived roughly in the same time and place depicted by Wilder. During the first quarantine summer (2020), my family and I were binging heavily on the “Little House On the Prairie” television show and starting to read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” novels.

The birchbark house story