The Mighty Red

Both Hugo and his mother Bev work in her bookstore, and the town of Tabor has a lively book club. Louise Erdrich weaves several novels into her book, using intertextuality to enrich her narrative and craft subtle points of engagement with the theme of Love’s Many Forms. Erdrich’s interest in love and human relationships underpins much of her work and forms a critical connection between The Mighty Red and many of her other novels. Books read by both the book club and Kismet, each in their own way, also investigate different forms that love can take, and they thus provide a window into the way that Erdrich’s characters understand their feelings and relationships. One of the book club’s first books is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. This text traces the post-divorce journey of a woman who is learning to love herself after her marriage comes to an end. Many of the women in this novel wrestle with how to practice self-love, including both Kismet and Crystal, but also Winnie, whose marriage to the man whose father bought up her own father’s failed farm has an undercurrent of anxiety despite its happiness.