Reading The Round House: A Realistic, Intense Narrative Delivers a Lesson on Gendered and Ethnic Violence

As a summer reading book, we read this book differently than we will read books in the school year. Some of us read it leisurely in a hammock whiling away a summer afternoon. You may have even called Birchbark Books to order another novel by Louise Erdrich and engaged in the very 2020 act of curbside pick-up. Other readers crammed it in during the last week of summer vacation perhaps wishing we had more time to read, wondering why we didn’t read early in this longest summer vacation in decades. Still others of us read the first chapter, grumbled about the entire institution of summer reading, and now stewing about how we’ll manage to write a short essay on a novel we really didn’t read. (If that last category is you, please read the first chapter closely and write on this chapter. The chapter is incredibly rich and can easily anchor an essay.)