Makoons (Birchbark House, 5)

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The fifth entry in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series about the mid-19th-century Ojibwa girl/woman Omakayas and her family, <i>Makoons</i> (2016), begins not long after the fourth, <i>Chickadee</i> (2012), ends, with one of Omakayas’ eight-year-old twin sons, Makoons (Little Bear), still recovering from his illness caused by missing his beloved twin Chickadee when that boy was kidnapped and taken to the prairie far away from their Minnesota woods, lakes, and islands home. Though now the twins have been reunited on the prairie where the family relocated to recover Chickadee, Erdrich inserts ominous foreshadowing early on, as Makoons has a vision revealing that their family will never return to Minnesota and that the twins won’t be able to save everyone from some trouble.Most of the boys’ loving family is still present: mother Omakayas, father Animikiins, grandmother Yellow Kettle, grandfather Deydey, beautiful aunt Angeline and her husband Fishtail, happy go lucky uncle Quill, wise great-grandmother Nokomis, and tomboy with a vengeance second-cousin Two Strike. Bizheens, Omakayas’ beloved adopted baby brother from the second and third books in the series who should now be the teenage uncle of the twins, is still absent without any mention by the characters or explanation from the author.The novel depicts the boys learning to ride horses for buffalo hunting, which is how the family must support themselves on the prairie. For Makoons horseback riding is easy and natural, guiding his pony Whirlwind with his legs and teaching it to run at a buffalo skin without shying, while Chickadee repeatedly falls off his horse, until Uncle Quill gives him a better pony, which turns out to be vicious and willful, so the twins name it Sweetheart. Makoons and Chickadee observe the adults in their big family and small community hunting and rendering the buffalo (“the Generous Ones”) into useful meat and hides and other commodities. (One does wonder how the adults could so quickly become such accomplished buffalo hunters and processors after having lived all their lives in the forests and islands back east.) The boys also watch the absurd antics of a muscular, handsome, and vain young man called Gichi Noodin, who likes to preen, pose, show off, brag, assume that every girl and woman admires him, and—to his cost—ignore buffalo hunting protocol.Erdrich must have decided that her children’s series should have child protagonists, and because the end of the third novel ended Omakayas’ girlhood, she moved the series forward twelve years to focus on Omakayas’ twin sons. OK. But in the process of outgrowing her protagonist role, Omakayas lost her appealing and vivid personality as well as her gifts (affinity for bears, spirits, dreams, and visions). Now only her sons have such gifts, and her main distinctive personality trait is to ensure that her husband and twins are presentable by braiding their hair every morning. Erdrich, then, valorizes childhood as a special, more imaginative, sensitive, and interesting time in a person’s life.At the same time, Erdrich contrived to move Omakayas and her family from the forests and lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota onto the great plains, gaining thereby a new field of historical Native American life oriented around buffalo to write about (paralleling the move west of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family in <i>The Little House on the Prairie</i> books). She thrillingly depicts a Native American buffalo hunt and vividly describes what comes after, not hiding the butchery, blood, and flies while describing the different uses the different parts of the buffalo were put to.The fourth novel compellingly focuses on Chickadee being separated from his family and having to survive apart from them as he comes to appreciate his name, but here in the fifth book Makoons does not have a very interesting experience on which to center a story. Makoons, like Chickadee, feels like a real boy, desiring to participate in a buffalo hunt before he’s old enough and playing funny tricks on the clueless Gichi Noodin, but his role as protagonist is a strangely minor one, without much development or even a substantial portion of the point of view scenes relative to other characters like Chickadee and even an adopted buffalo calf. And Gichi Noodin’s story arc is much more compelling than Makoons’, as the egotistical buffoon learns to see other people instead of only himself. “Before, he’d seen only his own reflection in his mind, or the eyes of other people. Now he was truly looking at people.”Erdrich is great at writing scenes kids would enjoy, like one in which Gichi Noodin loses his pants during a buffalo hunt, and at poignant scenes like one featuring the twins’ great-grandmother Nokomis. She writes a neat story within her story, when Omakayas tells one about a man who marries a bear woman and joins her people.But the novel feels less substantial, realized, and finished than the earlier books in the series, and I even started noticing some of Erdrich’s neat illustrations from earlier books being recycled into this one, like the drawing ostensibly showing a buffalo hide being scraped that originally illustrated little Omakayas scraping a moose hide, and even the central picture on the cover is not a new one showing Makoons as a boy but an old interior illustration from the first book in the series showing Omakayas as a girl greeting two bear cubs.Finally, <i>Makoons</i> ends on something of a cliffhanger involving the twins, a vision, and darkness, but I am running out of steam for reading the series and am not anxiously waiting for Erdrich to finish the sixth entry. I do highly recommend the first three books about Omakayas as a girl, starting with the wonderful <i>The Birchbark House</i> (1999).

A perfect middle grade book. Follow the adventures of a tight-knit Native American family as they hunt the mighty buffalo. This book made me laugh, roll my eyes and cry all in the span of two hours.

My daughter read this in one day, she was so excited it had come. If you've read the other Birchbark House books, you won't be disappointed. As a stand-alone, I think it would still be very moving. And plenty of humor, standing alongside the sadness-- neither one cancelling the other out. We're also so pleased the author continues to put Ojibwemowin in these books!Wonderful story on many levels.You can enjoy it just as entertainment, but there's so much more than that, for child and adult readers.

I loved this book it is a fun book but you learn a little while reading!I am so glad I found this book and I can not wait to read the next book!

She tells such a fine story. I put my 7 year old boy to sleep many nights with this one.

This one is going to be brought to the attention of our city library, children's department. In fact I might volunteer to read parts of it myself to the little ones Saturday Library Club.

As an adult reader, I love this series of books. I think it on par with Little House on the Prairie books. Although I would have loved to have more of a transition from Omakayas childhood to adulthood, I would give the first four books more than 5 stars if I could. Makoon gets 4 stars because of the ending. Don’t read on if you don’t want a spoiler. The death of the grandmother was beautiful and to be expected. But the subsequent deaths were not necessary. Two Strikes’ dogs did not need to kill the lamb. It had become part of their pack. And she did not need to kill her dogs in retaliation. The blame could have been placed on her, if, for some reason, the lamb needed to die. Omakayas’ sister and brother-in-laws deaths were unnecessary. These combined with leaving the reader up in the air concerning Makoon’s dream made for a quite depressing ending. Your loyal readers need a book 6 to finish the story, continue the childhood of the twins, and leave us with an uplifting ending. Please. Our world of filled with too much negativity and depression for the present generation of youth. They need happy escape.