Mothers often cling to single moments, small gestures, and specific memories in order to grasp all that happens in the first blurry year of a baby's life. In The Blue Jay's Dance, writer Louise Erdrich has assembled a photo album of snapshots such as these: the days and images that collectively define the passion, ambivalence, yearnings, and satisfactions of carrying, birthing, and nurturing a baby. "Any sublime effort has its dark moments," says Erdrich, referring to a rather bleak snapshot of mother isolation. "Perhaps, if anything, the meaning in this book for others may be this: Here is a job in which it is not unusual to be, at the same instant, wildly joyous and profoundly stressed." The Blue Jay's Dance is a fresh and masterful book that avoids all the sticky clichés while still managing to articulate the depths of mother-baby love.


From Publishers Weekly
Erdrich, who has published poetry and critically acclaimed novels (Love Medicine, The Beet Queen), here describes her experience with giving birth and the joyful year of mothering that follows. The baby whose arrival she chronicles is the youngest of her three daughters but is also a composite of the biological children among the family's six. A keen observer of nature, Erdrich also movingly evokes wild-animal life and the seasonal changes that take place outside the secluded New Hampshire home of Erdrich and her husband, writer Michael Dorris. Although her mystical side is evident in her descriptions of the natural world and in her account of the strong bond she formed with her new baby, she also looks at life with refreshing common sense. She dismisses the "pseudo spiritual advice" that refers to intense labor pain as "discomfort" and admits to occasionally feeling resentment at her baby's screams. Erdrich lightens her prose with several recipes that she and her husband prepare together, as well as a menu for an all-licorice dinner. An enchanting, lyrical rendering of a "mother's vision." Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Ensconced in her farmhouse in rural New Hampshire and the cottage across the road where she writes, embraced by her devoted writer husband, Michael Dorris, and their several children, Erdrich (The Bingo Palace, LJ 1/94) is pregnant with her third daughter. She is attuned to the rhythms of nature, the movements of small animals, and the quickening of the baby inside her; in this journal she records impressionistically the birth and first seasons of her newborn's life. Her even, trusting prose is punctuated by dazzling observations of man, nature, and child: the solace she takes in burying her face into her husband's luxuriant hair while pushing her baby; the ecstatic tossing of trees in the wind, a landscape so different from her native North Dakota; the "sense of oceanic oneness" that only breastfeeding brings. Erdrich the writer and mother fuse seamlessly in this lyrical affirmation of generation; containing recipes prepared by Dorris, it is sure to be popular in all libraries.Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Novelist Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction is a captivating account of her attempt to juggle the joys and demands of selfhood, writerhood, and motherhood. She and her husband, the writer Michael Dorris, are one of America's most famous literary couples and the parents of six children. The oldest three are adopted, their youngest three, all daughters, are their birth children. Dorris has written about their struggle with the consequences of one adopted son's affliction with fetal alcohol syndrome in The Broken Cord (1989). Now, in a much rosier book, Erdrich shares her piquant observations about pregnancy, birth, and caring for a newborn. Ever attuned to the natural world around her, Erdrich has used a seasonal structure for her account of a "birth year" and drawn connections between the stages she and her baby experience and the life cycles of the plants and creatures of the New Hampshire woods surrounding their home. Forthright and radiantly alive, Erdrich writes about all the magic and misery of motherhood and the often incompatible but, for her, inextricably connected arts of writing and mothering. By placing her life within the web of nature, she affirms our place in the cosmos; by articulating her innermost thoughts in such pristine and bracing prose, she affirms the glory and uniqueness of human consciousness. Donna Seaman



"Observant, tender and honest."


Book Description
In The Blue Jay's Dance, Louise Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction, she brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and the insights, the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions she experienced in the course of one twelve month period--from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to fall a return to writing. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and small events that mothers--parents--everywhere will recognize and appreciate.


About the Author
Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota and is a mixed blood enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is the author of eight novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Love Medicine and the National Book Award finalist The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, as well as poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood, The Blue Jay's Dance. Her short fiction has won the National Magazine Award and is included in the O. Henry and Best American short-story collections. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore, The Birchbark.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The acclaimedauthor relates the joys, frustrations, and profound emotional satisfactions she experienced in the course of one year, from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to a fall return to writing.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

During the last ten years, Louise Erdrich has written seven critically acclaimed and best-selling books and has also given birth to three children. In The Blue Jays' Dance, her first major work of nonfiction, she brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and insights, the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions she experienced in the course of one twelve-month period - from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to a fall return to writing. Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and small events that mothers - parents - everywhere will recognize and appreciate. A keenly spiritual observer of the natural world, she turns a poet's eye to the harmony of growth and change, of beginnings and endings, of love and longing. From the vantage point of a small house in New England, she looks out to the North Dakota horizon of her childhood and inward to an infant's first glimpse of a wild bird. The Blue Jay's Dance takes the mundane routines of everyday life and renders them marvelous, even while it records the odyssey of a woman's deepening awareness of the rhythms that bind families together. Once again, Louise Erdrich discovers the universal within the particular moment and gives full-bodied expression to that most common and yet most mysterious of all human tasks: the passing on of life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Detroit Free Press

Louise Erdrich gives a powerful vision of the broad stages that mark most women's lives: birth, maturation, marriage, motherhood, death...She gracefully weaves traditional religious imagery and the common moments in our lives.

San Francisco Chronicle

A significant voice...The dominant chord of Louise Erdrich's poetry is that of an instinctive acceptance of life's unknowable mysteries.

New York Times Book Review

Observant, tender and honest.

People

Pregnancy, birth and caring for an infant inspire Erdrich's reflections on being a woman, a mother and a writer in this affecting memoir of a daughter's first years. Erdrich transforms the mundane into a paean to the mystery and wonder of the creative force, and a celebration of family, and wonder of the creative force, and a celebration of family, nature and memory.

People Magazine