The Grass Dancer

Rating:
Summary: Inescapable Connections
Review: Although Grass Dancer is no suspense novel, Susan Power's utilization of literary techniques keeps her readers guessing as they turn the pages of her novel. In the first chapter, Power introduces Harley, the lonely teenager who loses his father and brother before he is born. Because of this introduction and the involvement of Harley in the next chapter, one would imagine that Grass Dancer will focus primarily on this sullen boy. However, Power's text twists and turns, giving new depth and dimension to other interesting folks like Jeanette McVay, Mercury Thunder, Pumpkin, Herod Small War, and his mother, Lydia, just to name a few. Thus, with each of these new points of view, the narrator modifies the reader's initial impressions of a character.

The reader also understands that one person's story cannot exist without incorporating the rest of the community into his or her narration. How could one explain Lydia and Evie's circumstances without including in the account Mercury Thunder and her awful past? How does the disappearance of Charlene's mother make sense until Crystal can clarify her actions? This notion of community overcomes any time barrier, as seen with Red Dress. Though she is a figure of the past, she continues to affect her people, asserting that, "I am a talker now and I chatter in my people's ears until I grow weary of my own voice" (p. 282). She transcends worldly constraints to reach her people and affect them with her story. Though she is dead, Red Dress' sense of community remains in tact, and she makes sure that it is felt by her descendents.

Above all, Grass Dancer is an excellent read for anyone remotely interested in the Dakota culture. Power's use of dialogue and varying points of view give richness to the text that helps the reader join into her community's intertwining stories. Happy reading!

Rating:
Summary: Several hours of life that I will never get back...
Review: First off this book was very well written. I have met the author and she is a very intelligent woman. However despite her intelligence and writing ability, this book was terrible. The entire book is a soap opera, the characters sleeping with one another and then blaming their actions on someone else's black magic. Would I recommend it to anyone? no.

Rating:
Summary: Thumbs up!
Review: I recently was assigned The Grass Dancer for my Native American Literature class. I must say that this is a fantastic book. All of the characters are beautifully crafted. The stories of each character, such as Anna Thunder and Lydia Wind Soldier give the reader real insight as to why each character behaves in a particular way. The loss that the various characters suffer does not fill me with sadness, but gives me hope that they will see each other once again once they leave this world. The backwards progression of time brings Harley Wind Soldier to a place that allows him to fill the hole over his heart. This story displays the vivid and very much alive culture of the Dakota Sioux. Susan Power does a wonderful job of creating a world that is true and completely fictional all at the same time. I would definitely recommend this book to other people.

Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable Feat!
Review: If you are looking for a book that is engaging and compelling, Susan Power's "The Grass Dancer" is it. Indeed, this book is at once exciting, poignant, and meaningful. I have to say that, among the numerous books that I have read since high school, this one ranks (at least) in the top 20. When I put down the book, I felt as though I had just awoken from a beautiful dream.
Power recreates the world of magic and spirituality in a tapestry of beautiful language and webs of stories. "The Grass Dancer" is about the traditions of the Dakota Indian people-both past and present-and the narrative switches from one narrator to another, giving us multiple perspectives into the lives of these characters. The chapters go back in time, so that events unfold in front of our eyes, making the present situation of these characters understandable. Each character seems to be finding a way to be complete, and at the end of almost each chapter, each one of them sprouts strong and resilient, like grass that is hard to pull out. Power brings us in a journey through time and space, illustrating the power of imagination, such as the possibility of walking on the moon.
Grass serves as a symbol of power, particularly Indian power. Dancing becomes a way in which an Indian keeps his or her hopes up, making it a dance that is imbued with a kind of survival energy. Power's message in this book can be summed up in this sentence, where she writes, "...look at the magic. There is still magic in the world."
This book is infused with humor to keep you interested, and spirituality to keep you inspired. The presence of love among characters is so moving that it will stir your emotions. All in all, Power hits every aspect of an Indian's life: the dichotomy between Indian and white culture, the problems that arise out of dual heritage, disease, spirits, magic, ancestral powers, religion, and love. I would re-read this book, whether it be for inspiration, or simply for pleasure. Perhaps you would find the same joy by reading this incredible story.

Rating:
Summary: A journey between past, present, and future...
Review: Susan Power's "The Grass Dancer" is marvelously enjoyable. It tells of people on a Sioux reservation whose lives intersect and intertwine, briefly, or over a lifetime, and how their relationships effect one another. We meet these people much as we most often do in real life, starting with the present and working backwards. The story slowly unravels the mystery of why the characters behave the way they do. Each chapter is told from the perspective of one character and charts the incidents which develop their personality. Ghosts of ancestors visit the present day characters and bring a sense of identity and purpose to them. It is a wonderful tale of the continuity and validity of the tribal culture and the interconnectivity between all the characters - past, present, and future. Using realism and mysticism, traditional Sioux and contemporary cultural elements, and above all, fluid, picturesque language, Ms. Powers has written a book which is wonderful on first reading and will develop more meaning with each successive one. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Glimpse into Dakota Culture
Review: Susan Power's novel The Grass Dancer is a wonderful look into the lives of the Dakota, a part of the Sioux. Her words are so rich and descriptions incredibly vivid about not only the grass dance itself from the beginning but also about the lives of the indivdual characters in the book.

The organization of the book is what makes Power's novel stand out in my mind. She uniquely makes each chapter from a different person's perspective. This gives the reader a glimpse into the lives of so many people that make up the entire Native American community. Every aspect of the reservation is shown from the young Harley, Pumpkin and Charlene to the older Mercury Thunder and mythical Red Dress. So many tales and myths run through out the novel. Through the art of story telling Power's characters keep the history of their people alive for generations to come.
Power's novel was a rich glimpse into the lives of many many people who all lived together, working to live harmoniously in the same community.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful, lyrical, moving
Review: Susan Power's THE GRASS DANCER, although billed as a novel, is a series of tightly bound stories centered around the thematic core of a Sioux myth. Separately, these stories, many of which have been previously published in high-quality magazines such as The Atlantic and The Paris Review, are excellent, but read as a whole, one after the other, they form a powerful whole - a novel, if you will. The world Ms. Power creates it at once current and ancient, with legends and tales of ancestors so entwined with the present day that the Native American characters seem less like individuals and more like highlighted segments on a multi-branched and infinitely continuing time line. But that is not to say that Ms. Power creates simple characters. Her people are complex and often troubled, struggling with the magic that swirls around them.

The individual stories tell the larger one of Native Americans, in particular the Sioux, and their battles, both physical and metaphysical, with the white men who invaded their land. This is not a historical novel, however, but rather a lyrically psychological one, where myth becomes fact. The pivotal legend that embraces all the characters in The Grass Dancer is the one of Red Dress, a Sioux woman with breath the scent of plums and a spirit that guides a long line of women to their destinies, both tragic and exhilarating. Charlene, a direct descendent from Red Dress, is in love with Harley, a descendent of Red Dress's husband Ghost Horse. But Harley keeps in his heart the spirit of another woman. Charlene's grandmother, Mercury, uses Red Dress's magic to control men and to wrest Charlene from her mother. Lydia, who is mute by choice, survives her husband and son, dead because of her anger with the magic of Red Dress. The magic in this novel has such force that when Red Dress finally tells her own story, we cannot wait to see what kind of mortal she was that gave rise to such spiritual power. Sadly, the Red Dress story is the weakest of the book. Her motivation to lure white men to their deaths, ultimately bringing on her own, seems flimsy. However, Red Dress as a spirit has become so poignant through the other stories that her final appearance in the novel is perhaps one of the most moving passages.

Susan Power is an extraordinarily gifted writer with a taste for language that makes a reader want to linger over her words. Her imagination is so precise that it is difficult to accept that her characters do not exist beyond the pages.

Rating:
Summary: Practically Lyrical
Review: The editorial and other customer reviews do a good job of covering the characters and basic plot, so I won't go into that.

This has to be the best book I've read in months. It's practically lyrical, the sentences are so pretty. The dust jacket is more than a little off on the plot, so don't read that. It's a collection of self contained stories about a messed up family living on a reservation in North Dakota.

Each story is narrated by a different person and takes place a random number of years before the last one. The effect is that each new chapter gives you a different understanding of the events in the previous chapters, until you get back to the "present" time from the first chapter, where you have a completely new take on everyone involved.

It's unusual to find a short story collection this good from such a new author. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Review of Grass Dancer
Review: This book weaves a myriad of folk motifs into the fabric of reality, creating a vibrant tale about the connections among generation, about how the actions of our ancestors can affect out contemporary lives-and how the presence resonates in us.

The story creates a foundation in the 1860s-when a Dakota warrior-Ghost Horse, lost his love-Red Dress. Since then, their spirits have sought to be reunited, and it is the playing out of this drama that shapes the sometimes violent fate of those who have come after them. The story jumps to the 1980s,where Charlene Thunder, a teenage descendant of Red Dress, is in love with Harley Wind Soldier, a traditional dancer of Ghost Horse's lineage. When Harley's soulmate, Pumpkin, dies, Charlene suspects her grandmother, the infamous Anna Thunder- who is both revered and feared by the Dakota community.

Charlene and Harley strive to make peace with the ghosts of their pasts while contending with the living. Other significant characters include Jeanette McVay, an American college student studying the tribe; Crystal Thunder-who must escape to Chicago to find her past; Herod Sall War-a member of the community who provides spiritual guidance; and Margaret Many Wounds-Harley's grandmother who he sees walking on the moon.

The story combines the mythic and supernatural aspect of the Dakota heritage with the contemporary Dakota tribe to serve as a very entertaining and interesting text!

Rating:
Summary: An Inside Look at a Little Known Spiritualism.
Review: This is an interesting book that gives us a series of stories about Sioux spirituality. The stories are loosely interconnected with each other and tell of people who maintain an ability to employ a sort of black magic. With this "gift" they communicate with past generations, conjure up love potions, compel others to self destruction, and other bizarre phenomena. Within these stories is a generally clear view of life in a modern day Indian reservation. The author, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation who grew up in Chicago, gives an inside view of a live fairly removed from mainstream America. I got the feeling that there was a fair amount of autobiographical material included in these stories.

I was prepared to give this book a "3 Star" rating until I noticed how well the author pulled things together towards the end. I had made the mistake of reading the book one story at a time spaced in between my other reading. I finished the last third of the book in a day's time and was able to catch the inter-relationships of the stories. Still, I was not as drawn into the spiritual magic as others may be. I don't discredit this phenomena but I suspect there are others who will get more out of the book than I did. I did enjoy a lot of the local flavor. I don't ever recall seeing any other novel that mentioned my wife's hometown of Mandaree, North Dakota. I have come to appreciate that there is a real element of spiritual magic through her Hidatsa/Mandan roots. Of the many stories and incidents that she has shared with me, I do vividly recall the night after her mother's funeral. My wife expressed her aprehension about going to bed that night because she was sure her mother's spirit would come to visit. That night, about 2AM, our house dog started barking. He never barks indoors at night and, when I got up to look around, nothing explained his outburst. I was puzzled, my wife wasn't. Susan Powers shares a lot of this in "The Grass Dancer" but on a much larger scale.