There’s intense feeling, suspense, passion, and above all, deep sympathy for people in pain. The other two stories are even better-so much better that Faye’s story suffers in comparison. I was immediately interested in Faye and wondered why she was so closed off and what would make her open up. Why not just tell stories without the MacGuffin? But when the stories work, they work. I’ll admit to being a little tired of stories connected by an object-at least I’m tired of these books in theory. Then, we move ahead to a disastrous event in the life of a family whose fate is bound up in the drum. First, we go back a generation, to the man who made the drum, and the tragedy that led to its creation. From here, Louise Erdrich’s novel tells the story of the drum’s past and its future and of the people whose lives it touches. Almost immediately, Faye feels a mystical connection to the drum, and she decides to seek out its owner. When Faye is cleaning out a client’s home, she comes across a painted Ojibwe drum that sounds when she first comes near it. She keeps herself distant from everyone, including her lover, who is grieving his own losses. In fact, she seems committed to silencing the voices of her dead, among them her sister and her father. Every now and then, she and her mother, Elsie, acquire an artifact from their own Ojibwe heritage, but Faye herself doesn’t feel particularly connected to her Ojibwe ancestors. The business she owns with her mother requires her to go through the possessions of the recently deceased, as she helps the surviving relatives to dispose of the estate. Faye Travers has turned other people’s ghosts into her career, but she carefully avoids her own ghosts.
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