As I thought I would, I loved North Dakota reading. The people are quiet, solid, and deep. The winters are harsh, and the light is golden on the prairie. I love prairies, and I love reading about winter, and North Dakota has both in spades.

Novel: The Round House
Author: Louise Erdrich, raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota
Setting: 1988 on an unnamed North Dakota reservation

Part coming-of-age, part rape mystery, and most interestingly, part study of tribal jurisdiction, The Round House is a masterful blending of the devastation and destruction sexual assault has on the victim and her family, the intricacies of law that prohibit justice from being done, and the innocence of a 13-year-old boy who cannot stand by as his mother’s attacker goes free.

Erdrich has written a beautiful novel that is about all of these things. It is a rich, full story that is multi-layered to pull the reader in and keep you engaged. At its core it radiates two important messages: the rape of Native women by non-Native men continues to be a massive problem and “the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists.”

They’d built [the Round House] to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.

In The Round House, Joe learns from his dad the details of the case. His father is a tribal judge. The intricacies of the law, of where the crime occurred, and therefore whose jurisdiction it would be, ultimately sets the perpetrator free. And as so often happens with men in fiction, the young son takes matters into his own hands when he sees the law and justice system will fail to bring the attacker to account for his crime.

Book: Prairie Silence: A Memoir
Author: Melanie Hoffert, raised on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota
Setting: Wyndmere and the Hofferts’ farm, North Dakota

Growing up gay in a land where nobody talks about feelings, nobody was (publicly) gay, and where everyone is Christian is… hard. Prairie Silence is Melanie Hoffert’s memoir of being pulled to the land of North Dakota, back to her childhood farm, the golden prairie, and the solid people of her home to finally break her own silence. She describes the landscape in the exact ways I love to read.

The flat land is not dry, not dark, not lifeless. Instead, North Dakota is a painter’s palette where all of the earthly colors settle. The light changes minute by minute, following unassuming subjects: a wheat field, a gravel road, a gray grain elevator.

Hoffert’s book is a tender account of her struggle to reconcile her love for women with her love for God, who her Bible camp co-counselers assure her hates homosexuals.

The God I talked to as a child, the God my mom relied on to soothe my pains, the God Jessica and I had championed as teenagers was not my God, but the God of the people I met at camp. And those people introduced me to judgments about the world I couldn’t accept. The most painful judgment was about the way I could love another person.

I really loved this book, and especially Melanie’s descriptions of her gayness: it’s not about sex but about the pure connection with, understanding of, and love for another person. This whole book radiates love. It is a love letter to her home of North Dakota. Through her writing it is clear how warm her heart is for the land, the people, and the God of her childhood.

Novel: Peace Like a River
Author: Leif Enger, lives in Minnesota near the ND border
Setting: Minnesota and the badlands of North Dakota

Set in 1962-1963 Minnesota and the badlands of North Dakota, Peace Like a River is a beautifully told tale of a family — our narrator Reuben, his sister Swede, and their father Jeremiah Land — who take to the badlands of North Dakota in an Airstream camper in winter to find their outlaw brother and son, Davy. Like Joe in The Round House, the teenaged Davy takes matters into his own hands when he sees attackers going unpunished.

And then he is on the run on horseback, just like the heroes of the Western novels young Swede is constantly devouring.

The title is perfect for this narrative, for despite the harsh conditions of the characters, I felt a peace reading it. There is light in this book, a wholesome goodness, especially through the humble and remarkable father, Jeremiah Land, who has a deep relationship with God, and who sometimes very quietly performs miracles. I also adore Reuben’s sister, 8 year-old Swede, who is a young writer who sits her saddle on a sawhorse in the Airstream and types rhyming verse of her hero Sunny Sundown as they hurtle down the highways of North Dakota searching for Davy.

And finally, I loved the scenery. Enger, a native of the Minnesota/North Dakota border area, writes the land, the grain, the sky, the wind, and of course, the snow, beautifully. The setting is another character in the book, and a strong one.