51 pages • 1 hour read
Louise ErdrichA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
On a cold winter day, nine-year-old Shawnee rummages through cupboards, coat pockets, and even the garbage can in their small house looking for food to give her younger sister, Alice, and toddler brother, Apitchi. Their mother left them alone to hitchhike into town, and their closest neighbor, Bernard, is six miles away. While Apitchi cries from hunger, Shawnee plies him with drops of cough syrup and some crumbs she finds hiding under shelf paper. Her persistence pays off when she digs into a pocket and pulls out a candy bar, which she divides between them.
A while later, the children realize “the oil ran out, because it got so cold, so fast” (193) in the house. Shawnee dresses everyone in the warmest clothing she can find, including a snowsuit, but it isn’t enough to defend against the chill. They once had a woodstove, which is now languishing behind the house, but Shawnee remembers that the stove’s pipe is “propped next to the back door” (194). With Alice’s help, she fits the pipe into the hole in the wall where it used to sit to vent the woodstove, and fashions a grill below it out of an oven rack.
By Louise Erdrich
Antelope Woman
Louise Erdrich
Fleur
Louise Erdrich
Future Home of the Living God
Louise Erdrich
LaRose
Louise Erdrich
Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich
Shadow Tag
Louise Erdrich
The Beet Queen
Louise Erdrich
The Bingo Palace
Louise Erdrich
The Birchbark House
Louise Erdrich
The Game of Silence
Louise Erdrich
The Leap
Louise Erdrich
The Master Butchers Singing Club
Louise Erdrich
The Night Watchman
Louise Erdrich
The Plague Of Doves
Louise Erdrich
The Red Convertible
Louise Erdrich
The Round House
Louise Erdrich
The Sentence
Louise Erdrich
The Shawl
Louise Erdrich
Tracks
Louise Erdrich