The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm working my way through award winners, sight unseen, and this one happens to be one of them. I didn't know what to expect except that it was probably one of a long line of the new breed of Magical Realism.

What makes it special? Well, I LOVE the whole Twins theme going on. White beads and black, indeed. Mix this with a very large sense of time, weaving in and out of Native American history up near Minneapolis, mixing Germans into the mix, some dog ancestry (separate from the humans, thank you very much,) and we've got a tale that slides across a couple of hundred years.

The magic is mild, the characters are sometimes very interesting, but above all, the core theme is the mixing of cultures. It's the mixing of whole lives, for good or ill.

I totally recommend this for anyone who is interested in diverse cultures, who like to have a different kind of read from the usual fare, and who like a bit of poetry woven into a worldview. I honestly had a pretty good time with this. It FELT magical even when there wasn't all that much magic going on. It got me out of my skin.

Oh, and the times we were in a dog's PoV was pretty awesome. :)

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