As the book opens on August 7, Cedar is 26, plans to be an unwed mother (though she lives with the guy), and has just resolved to visit her birth mother for the first time when she gets a phone call from her adoptive father (who doesn’t like her travel plans when things are so unsettled). Stepfather Eddy owns and runs a Superpumper franchise gas station, up the highway and over the border to Canada. That heritage involves no special powers, no links to “healing spirits or sacred animals,” and reservation life seems pretty good.

Her first-person narrator is a young woman, four months pregnant, knowing how vague all reports of the crisis are, yet (since something’s messing with the bloodlines in new births) troubled enough to start this combination diary and scrapbook – addressed to a child she hopes will be entirely human.Ĭedar Hawk Songmaker got her exotic name when two well-off Minneapolis liberals (WASPs turned Buddhist) adopted a Native infant whose Ojibwe mother called her Mary Potts.

In Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich works elements from taut near-future dystopian thrillers, apocalyptic SF, and epic fantasy into a narrative where the sudden change that’s stricken Earth is too great and new to comprehend, the perspective too intensely personal for Avatars of Good and Evil to battle over the planet’s fate.

Future home of the living god review