As Erdrich explains in her afterword, conflicts of jurisdiction and sovereignty have long made it difficult to prosecute non-Native men for the rape of Native-American women on or around reservations. There is the assault on Geraldine – not just the question of who committed it, but almost as important, where. The Round House, winner of the 2012 National Book Award for fiction, is a fusion of two stories, although that seedling image suggests an apter term: grafting. Soon, father and son will learn that Geraldine, Joe's lovely mother, has been brutally raped, and the different ways the boy and the man respond to this trauma can be construed from this seemingly mundane beginning. The symbolism is a shade heavy-handed, a fault that has been found with Erdrich's books in the past. For the first time ever, Joe's old man, a judge on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in the late 1980s, tires of the task before the boy does and leaves him to finish up. A t the beginning of The Round House, the novel's 13-year-old narrator, Joe, is helping his father pry out tree seedlings that have lodged in the cement-block foundation of his family's house.
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