Rating: 
Summary: wonderful read
Review: A well told story that is quite successful in evoking the Dakotas from the Euro-american experience.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent - one of Erdrich's best
Review: A wonderful story of life, love, and sacrafice without any of the sap. Gender, loss, the maladies that plague the human spirit.
Rating: 
Summary: A thoroughly depressing mess of a book.
Review: According to the title of this book, one would assume the book would be about The Master Butchers Singing Club. However, the singing club is only mentioned a handful of times and none of the members of the club are central characters. The flyleaf synopsis of the book would lead one to believe that the protagonist is Fidelis, the young German army sniper that leaves his country to create a new life in the United States after WWI. The true protagonist is Delphine, a vaudeville performer with serious emotional issues from her sad childhood marked with abandonment and acoholism.I kept reading hoping that something positive would happen to at least one character in this book, unfortunately the theme is "Life is cruel, Life is hard, don't be honest about your feelings because people will disappoint you and eventually leave you". After so many pages of alcoholic fathers, abandoned children, unrequited love, agonizing death and motherless sons, a blanket of sadness may settle on the reader that is difficult to shake off. There are plot threads that just end without any real closure, characters that aren't fleshed out enough to make the reader care what happens to them and very disjointed writing. The author glosses over a man returning from war, marrying his best friend's pregnant fiance, falling in love with his new wife and having a child all within a page and a half, however spends an entire paragraph describing the wonder store bought bread brings to the community. Altogether a sad and badly written book and I won't be reading anything else the author has written.
Rating: 
Summary: This book has very little to do with men
Review: Although not a terrible use of one's time, this book promises far too much in the title than it delivers. Two of my friends read it and I was supposed to cast the deciding vote. Gong, but only because I'm not all that interested in the real topic of the book.
Rating:
Summary: This book has very little to do with men
Review: Although not a terrible use of one's time, this book promises far too much in the title than it delivers. Two of my friends read it and I was supposed to cast the deciding vote. Gong, but only because I'm not all that interested in the real topic of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling Characters make this an intriguing read!
Review: As I read this book, I couldn't help feel the power of Fidelis Waldvogel, as well as the strength of Delphine Watzka. They were both wonderfully drawn characters who, though from different worlds, managed to share a similar destiny. Ms. Erdrich also created other characters with fascinating stories of their own while at the same time linking them all together in a meaningful way. I've read some reviews stressing disappointment in the stark landscape portrayed in this tale. I, however, found the descriptions of life in Argus, North Dakota of the 1930s intriguingly real and the images were refreshing to a metro New Yorker who has never visited that region of the U.S. I also found the Native American history enlightening and important. My only negative admission is that I found myself skimming the final couple chapters because the description got a bit tedious at that point. The ending, however, did not disappoint and I look forward to reading more of Louise Erdrich's writing.
Rating:
Summary: A Survivor in the true sense
Review: As soon as I finished this book, I started over on the first page to scan through the story and stopped to re-read sections to fully savor the connections and events over again. Delphine is a character I will remember for a long time. She is a true survivor, "No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, she wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman, but not one who could not afford, say, a hat with a little green feather. A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who'd lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she's awfully quick, but she's solid and reliable." The account of Eva and Delphine in the night garden drinking beer while they set the beer out to catch slugs is tender and funny and so full of life and death that it alone makes the book a treasure to read. I checked this book out of the library but I am going to order it. I want to keep these characters around, not return them.
Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly Beautiful
Review: Beautifully written story of haunting intensity with brilliant characterizations. A small town in the midwest holds lives and secrets and people that engage you and don't let you go. I couldn't put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth the time
Review: Erdrich tells a compelling story about memorable characters--Delphine and Cyprian, Eva and Fidelis--coping with trouble in between-the-wars North Dakota. But the prose is mostly unbearable, filled with sentimentality and unnecessary modifiers. This is a tale that would have benefited from sparer language, reflecting the harsh life these characters must have faced.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, complex, and deeply rewarding!
Review: Fidelis Waldvogel is no ordinary man; he's a master butcher. He was also a German sniper during WWI, but after the war, he attempts to put his past behind him, immigrating to America with a suitcase full of sausage. Selling his links across the States, Fidelis fetches up in small-town North Dakota, where he works for the local butcher, and eventually sets up his own shop. Once established, he sends for his war bride, Eva, who pragmatically ties on an apron and prepares to become an American butcher's wife. Meanwhile, Delphine Watzka, daughter of the town drunk, returns home from a stint as an acrobat, bringing her partner Cyprian along with her. Though they love each other, their relationship is an uneasy one, full of unspoken difficulties that must simply be ignored. They settle in, pretending to be married to thwart town gossips, and try to start afresh, being upstanding citizens and caring for Delphine's boozy father Roy. Delphine needs a job, and Eva offers her one at the butcher's; and as simply as that, the two anything-but-nuclear families become intertwined, joined in bonds of love and obligation that will last for their lifetimes. But another world war is on the horizon, threatening the next generation; will their way of life survive? Erdrich writes beautifully and capably, creating a lovingly detailed portrait of the Midwest between the world wars. Her descriptive and sensory prose evokes the pace of life in the early twentieth century, as does her skilfully rendered dialogue. The story is very loosely based on her grandfather's life (he is the butcher depicted on the cover), and her affection and interest in her subjects shows clearly. Her characters play their assigned small-town roles - the town drunk, the shrewish old maid - but they're much more than stereotypes, each one believable and sympathetic. Amidst the richness and quirkiness of his friends and neighbors, Fidelis is comparatively uninteresting; he's the narrative device that allows us to discover the townful of characters and their stories that form the real treasure of the novel. The plot isn't exactly action-packed, although plenty happens; the true pleasure comes from watching the complex relationships between the town's inhabitants develop from chapter to chapter. Certain plot elements - Delphine and Cyprian's vaudeville background, a horrific set of deaths that may or may not have been murder - could easily have been unconvincing or played for cheap laughs, but Erdrich has more respect for her story and characters than that. Instead, events build naturally upon each other, so that by the book's end, the reader feels almost as if they'd grown up in this small town and seen these stories unfold themselves. The Master Butchers Singing Club is fascinating, complex, and deeply rewarding. This riveting American saga of public faces and private sorrows is a must-read. Another book I strongly recommend is -------------------------------------------> WILL@EPICQWEST.COM by Tom Grimes, an excellent Amazon quick pick, easily the best purchase I've made this year.
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