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Summary: Last Report
Review: I'm going to have to reread the six novels that lead up to one. If Louise Erdrich never writes another novel about the folks in and around this fictional reservation she would have given us one huge and marvelous tale, encompassing the lives of characters who not only become the people we feel we've known (or, at least, wish we had known) but people who we feel have become our teachers: ones who teach us to see what is important; teach us to see grace and providence when things become irreversibly fouled up. "Little No Horse" is a strange place. I won't go into too many details, but it is a place where women over age seventy still have enough sex appeal to make men obsess (sexy enough to make priests want give up the call) -- reminiscent of the women of the Old Testament, particularly Genesis. In "The Last Report At Little No Horse" Louise Erdrich wrote less of the first person narratives -- which seemed to dominated the first six novels of this series -- telling the story predominately in the third person (my own opinion is telling a story from a third person perspective is much more difficult to do right). You need only open any page in this book to discover the work of a master wordsmith. Beautiful.
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Summary: A journey through time
Review: I'v read other books by Erdrich and had a hard time getting into them. This was different. Agnes takes us on a journey through her life in various forms. There is a little bit of everything in this book. A love story, a mystery, and comedy. It was a little slow to begin with. But after the first chapter, I couldn't put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: The Empress Has No Clothes
Review: In a few words: Boring. Overblown. Pretentious and unrealistic. Poorly written. Clumsy, clunky sentences. Give me a break! A few wonderful visual images do not redeem hundreds of underdeveloped characters, unfinished story lines, and poor editing, and chalking it up to "circular Indian thinking" is ridiculous. I give two, as opposed to one, stars due to the potential of a great story---ie, the author has imagination. Beyond that, I don't get the hype.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written...but the plot kind of bored me!
Review: Louise Erdrich creates a fascinating tapestry in her novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. The characters are slowly woven in and out of the story until an intricate work of beauty has been created. This is a story of a search for hope and faith that begins in an unusual manner. It begins with Father Damien writing for answers from Rome as he has for many decades. It is revealed that Father Damien is not who many believe him to be, but the question remains, is Father Damien the person that God needed Father Damien to be. The tale then steps back into how Father Damien arrives at Little No Horse, where many people enter into the tale. When Father Jude, arrives to investigate whether Sister Leopolda, a nun at the convent in Little No Horse, really deserves consideration for Sainthood the past is unwrapped layer by layer.
The questions of faith, suffering and sacrifice are examined, when does one supercede the other to elevate each to a higher level of love and true caring.
The story started out very slowly but, halfway through this novel, each page became a gem and when the story had ended it was a wonderful tale.
Rating: 
Summary: a rare gem of a novel............
Review: Louise Erdrich creates a fascinating tapestry in her novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. The characters are slowly woven in and out of the story until an intricate work of beauty has been created. This is a story of a search for hope and faith that begins in an unusual manner. It begins with Father Damien writing for answers from Rome as he has for many decades. It is revealed that Father Damien is not who many believe him to be, but the question remains, is Father Damien the person that God needed Father Damien to be. The tale then steps back into how Father Damien arrives at Little No Horse, where many people enter into the tale. When Father Jude, arrives to investigate whether Sister Leopolda, a nun at the convent in Little No Horse, really deserves consideration for Sainthood the past is unwrapped layer by layer.
The questions of faith, suffering and sacrifice are examined, when does one supercede the other to elevate each to a higher level of love and true caring.
The story started out very slowly but, halfway through this novel, each page became a gem and when the story had ended it was a wonderful tale.
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary
Review: Louise Erdrich outdid herself with the masterful story The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Having read all of her prior books, in my opinion, this book outshines them all.
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Summary: Sizzling Plots
Review: N A ONCE INNOCUOUS river, during the 1997 North Dakota flood, helpers rescued a woman in a billowing white nightgown floating by on the lid of a piano. Fascinated by this aquarelle image, author Goldberry M. Long wrote of a distressed heroine, Agnes, climbing on top of her piano and floating away to a new life. Further inspired by the image, the author, Louise Erdrich, started work on this intriguing and beguiling new novel, written during the flood. Louise Erdrich is of both Ojibwe and German-American heritage. This unusual duality surfaces frequently in her creative writings, as with Father Damion Modeste (a modest devil?) a near 100 year-old character in her story. Writer Erdrich states in an interview, 'Modeste's character begs the question, Are the personae we deliver to the world intrinsic to us or assumed by us?' Father Modeste's faces a dilemma; the Vatican wants to enquire into the background of Sister Leopolda, a candidate for sainthood. Only Damion knows of her ability to perform miracles, yet remaining capable of evil. For years he wrote directly to the Pope concerning his parish and included details of the miracles occurring at Little No Horse. However, he withheld essential facts until his last report. It reveals the unusual situation concerning Sister Leopolda and thundering facts concerning himself. Characters from Erdrich's previous works feature in the book. Gerry Nanapush appears in an uproarious sequence involving a mousy moose. In addition to its sizzling plots and powerful set pieces, we learn much from this book about Turtle Mountain Ojibwe culture. Its roots appear in ancient Manichaeism, a religious dissension that built on Christianity and tried to make its practice universal. It died out around the 5th century but revived in the 20th when its ancient scriptures resurfaced in Turkestan and Egypt. Erdrich's style makes for great extracts, several from this book appeared in The New Yorker
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Summary: Hopefully not the last report from Erdrich
Review: Such a great conclusion for those of us that have followed all of Erdrich's books and watched Father Damien in the background of them all. I absolutely loved how she refreshed memories of scenes from previous books and allowed names to resurfaced, as well as adding new tales. She keeps her writing as beautifully written in this book as she has done before.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The main character's transformation from Agnes to Father Damien seemed unrealistic, without explanation of her motivation. Agnes takes on the guise of a priest, apparently on a whim, and maintains that for the rest of her long life. Why would she do this? Perhaps those unfamiliar with transgendered people will believe this is possible. Some readers may be comforted by a character who never gives up her original sex, but maintains a disguise. In real life some people do live as the gender opposite to the one identified at birth, but not without a great deal of thought and effort. Real transgendered or transsexual people struggle with the difficulties of such an experience, no such struggles were reflected in this book. Otherwise the book had a good beginning, was generally well written and had some lovely passages.
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Summary: A secret exposed
Review: The sacred and the profane. Faith and eroticism. Earth-drying sunlight and earth-rending flood. Night and day. Heaven and Hell ... could any of them exist without their opposite? In her new novel, "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse," Louise Erdrich weaves the intricate and the uncomplicated into a story that is, by turns, extraordinarily tangled and beautifully concrete. Opposites dependent upon one another. Maybe it's because Erdrich writes in sacred circles. Families, generations, places, events and individual characters swirl among her various novels. The Turtle Mountain-Pembina Reservation, which sprawls across the Red River halfway into North Dakota -- the setting for "Love Medicine," "Tales of Burning Love" and other Erdrich tales -- is again the crucible where Erdrich re-mixes the lives of the Nanapush, Kashpaw, Morrissey, Mauser, Pillager, Lamartine and Lazarre families. In her work, you'll recognize Faulknerian rhythms: a northern plains Yoknapatawpha where the Sartorises, Snopeses and Compsons are known by Ojibwe names, where voices shift like sand. In circles where the literary air is more rarefied, Erdrich's juxtaposition of disparate concepts might be called *Manichean* -- relating to an ancient spiritual belief that life is governed by an endless battle between equally potent forces of good and evil, neither of which can ever annihilate the other. That's one way to look at it. But while her writing invites a number of interpretive methods and philosophies, it is Spartan and simply human, more Cather than Faulkner. In environs where landscape is less influential to life, readers might see only Manichean metaphors in rivers, forests and blizzards; in the West, it's just the way things are -- starkly contrasted depending on the time of day, the angle of sight, or the weather. The place that is good by day might be evil by dark. It is not just the stuff of Erdrich's writing, but her life, too. The pivotal event in "The Last Report" is a Dakota flood that not only sweeps Agnes away on the lid of a piano, but also represents her spiritual evolution -- her ordination, if you will -- into Father Damien. A heaven-sent event, delivered by the Muse of Metaphor into the fervid imagination of a writer in need of a symbol? In fact, it is a scene inspired by the 1997 flood on North Dakota's Red River. It is certainly an apt spiritual metaphor, but it is also a simple account of how fortunes are so swift to change in the Western landscape. Pick your poison, dear reader: Mysticism or reality. They both work. The part-Ojibwe Erdrich, like indigenous writers Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko, deftly blends mysticism and dark humor in a complex, compassionate amalgam that, when burnished, not only reflects the Indian experience, but human existence in any color, at any moment in time.
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