Book Review: The Master Butchers Singing Club

The Master Butchers Singing Club, written by Loiuse Erdrich in 2003, is filled with a plethora of complicated characters. Some came to America after World War I, looking for a new life. Others grew up in a small North Dakota community, where this story takes place. Three of these people form an interesting love triangle: Delphine, Fidelis, and Eva.

Besides the rich storyline, I had fun looking up words that were unfamiliar to me. Usually I resent an author who can’t tell a story in simple English, but I really enjoyed Erdich’s use of colorful words. Because of these new words I was finding, I decided to start a vocabulary widget on my blog (see left column), which has become quite popular.

Here is the last sentence in The Master Butchers Singing Club, an example of Erdrich's eloquent writing style: “Step-and-a-Half hummed in her sleep and sank deeper into her own tune, a junker’s pile of tattered courting verse and hunter’s wisdom and the utterances of itinerants or words that sprang from a bit of grass or a scrap of cloud or a prophetic pig’s knuckle, in a world where butchers sing like angels.”

You need to read the entire book to understand "Step-and-a-Half"...


Footnote: this is the same author of another book I’ve read and reviewed, The Plague of Doves (2008). It had a completely different style, but the same great character development.