Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Berkley (1997), Edition: Reissue, 333 pages
Description
Back in the 1860s, Ghost Horse, a handsome young sacred clown, loved and lost to death the beautiful warrior woman Red Dress. As their spirits seek desperately to be reunited, they influence the sometimes violent fate of those who have followed them. Now in the 1980s, Red Dress's teenage descendant Charlene Thunder has fallen hopelessly in love with Harley Wind Soldier, the dashing traditional dancer of Ghost Horse's lineage. When Harley's soul mate is killed in an accident, Charlene guiltily suspects her own grandmother, a notorious witch, of making it happen - just as she may well have caused the death of Harley's father and brother, which even today obsesses him. The Grass Dancer is a debut novel for Susan Power, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.… (more)
Media reviews
World Literature Today
Power's strong debut ...sense of story, her effective use of characters and plots... some telling unevenness...
Power's generations all face tremendous challenges in whatever time and place they happen to find themselves... the task of finding a way ... in a world where life and its challenges can
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end in a moment. Show Less
The Women's Review of Books
She chooses to represent indigenous history not as a record of defeat but rather as a continuing process whose outcome is still uncertain. The past and the spirit world lie within and around the present.
User reviews
LibraryThing member christinejoseph
@ Indians, Spirits etc. — @ beliefs — good
Inspired by the lore of her Sioux heritage, this critically-acclaimed novel from Susan Power weaves the stories of the old and the young, of broken families, romantic rivals, men and women in love and at war. Revealing the harsh price of unfulfilled
Inspired by the lore of her Sioux heritage, this critically-acclaimed novel from Susan Power weaves the stories of the old and the young, of broken families, romantic rivals, men and women in love and at war. Revealing the harsh price of unfulfilled
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longings and the healing power of mystery and hope, The Grass Dancer takes readers on a journey through past and present-in a tale as resonant and haunting as an ancestor's memory, and as promising as a child's dream. Show Less
LibraryThing member dczapka
Power's first novel is an unusual mélange of history and fantasy, tradition and modernity, and though its backwards-looking chronology is intriguing in a Memento-like way, it never captures the power and intrigue of its opening moments and ends up being ultimately more forgettable than
The novel opens with the enigmatic young girl Pumpkin, en route to college and taking one last tour of Midwestern powwows in an effort to keep in touch with her Native American routes. She impresses the young dancer Harley and they share a night that is captured in beautiful, ethereal writing. The next morning, Pumpkin is killed in a car accident, but instead of charging forward with how Harley reacts to the tragedy, the story plunges backwards to the roots of his family tree -- a family that is similarly haunted by the untimely death of his brother and father.
The web of narratives is impressive, and for the most part, Power handles each story well, but the novel's great weakness is that not every tale is nearly as interesting as the opening one. Pumpkin as a character exudes a liveliness and presence that even the malevolent magic woman Mercury Thunder can't match up to, so while the stories deeper in the history become more explanatory and revealing, they are not nearly as compelling.
Also uneven is Power's treatment of Native culture. There is a clear reverence for Native history and an expectedly ambivalent relationship to the reservation on which the novel takes place, but with the past feeling just as tainted with both internal and external evil as the present, there doesn't seem for Power to be an alternative to the reservation. As such, while the novel wants to make a provocative comment on what life is like for the modern Native American, it falls short and often settles for stereotypes and expected tropes instead of real, original commentary.
While the novel delves confidently into history, Power's greatest strengths lie in her ability to address the present, and she is at her best when she is remaining somewhat mysterious. Unfortunately, in a novel where the layers get deeper and deeper, the closer it gets to the end, the less satisfying it becomes. One longs instead to know far more about what happened AFTER chapter one, a story that remains untold and a promise that remains unfulfilled.
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impressive.The novel opens with the enigmatic young girl Pumpkin, en route to college and taking one last tour of Midwestern powwows in an effort to keep in touch with her Native American routes. She impresses the young dancer Harley and they share a night that is captured in beautiful, ethereal writing. The next morning, Pumpkin is killed in a car accident, but instead of charging forward with how Harley reacts to the tragedy, the story plunges backwards to the roots of his family tree -- a family that is similarly haunted by the untimely death of his brother and father.
The web of narratives is impressive, and for the most part, Power handles each story well, but the novel's great weakness is that not every tale is nearly as interesting as the opening one. Pumpkin as a character exudes a liveliness and presence that even the malevolent magic woman Mercury Thunder can't match up to, so while the stories deeper in the history become more explanatory and revealing, they are not nearly as compelling.
Also uneven is Power's treatment of Native culture. There is a clear reverence for Native history and an expectedly ambivalent relationship to the reservation on which the novel takes place, but with the past feeling just as tainted with both internal and external evil as the present, there doesn't seem for Power to be an alternative to the reservation. As such, while the novel wants to make a provocative comment on what life is like for the modern Native American, it falls short and often settles for stereotypes and expected tropes instead of real, original commentary.
While the novel delves confidently into history, Power's greatest strengths lie in her ability to address the present, and she is at her best when she is remaining somewhat mysterious. Unfortunately, in a novel where the layers get deeper and deeper, the closer it gets to the end, the less satisfying it becomes. One longs instead to know far more about what happened AFTER chapter one, a story that remains untold and a promise that remains unfulfilled.
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LibraryThing member juniperSun
At first, The Grass Dancer seems like just another ill-fated love story, but as the author traces the history of the passage of power from mother to daughter and back through the matrilineal line, the story is transformed into a declaration of a people's recovery of their heritage, learning through
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pain to find their own inner strengths. Show Less
LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd
This is more a collection of interconnected stories than a novel, in form. Some of them can easily stand alone. We progress backward (an oxymoron that says exactly what I mean) chronologically with each section until the final two chapters which circle back to where we began. New bits of family
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history are revealed each time, helping the reader to shed preconceived notions and understand certain characters with compassion. One brilliant example is the case of Jeannette McVay, whom we first meet as a disenchanted white woman who comes to the reservation to study a culture she views as more in tune with the natural world and spiritual realm than her own. She embarrasses herself with her misguided attempts to fit in, to "turn native", yet eventually she does become a respected member of the reservation community and brings about a very moving reunion/reconciliation. Life---it's complicated. There are heroes and villains on both sides of the cultural divide here, and the stories illustrate how easily things can go wrong whether one is trying to preserve a culture or subdue it. However, they also prove that sometimes things can unexpectedly go quite right, even when the odds are against it. I absolutely loved this book, and will seek out more of Powers' work. Show Less
LibraryThing member Crowyhead
Great book, mixing elements of magic and real life in uncommon ways.
LibraryThing member kakadoo202
confusing. goes back in time further and further until it comes back. By that time, I already forget the names of the main characters
LibraryThing member periwinklejane
I read this book ages ago, re-read it a couple of years later. I haven't picked it up in a while, and I'm almost afraid to. It's a story of a Native American family through several generations. There are a lot of fantasy and imagined elements that I worry I might not find as captivating as I did
There is one scene that has made a permanent imprint on my imagination. A group of young friends drive through the black hills during a rainstorm, after performing a grass dance. Power so perfectly described the scene I can hear the voices, taste the rain, and smell the damp old car even years after I read the passage.
I recommend this if you like Louise Erdrich's books, or have a liking of fantasy elements in literature.
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when I was younger, and had just visited the Badlands of South Dakota.There is one scene that has made a permanent imprint on my imagination. A group of young friends drive through the black hills during a rainstorm, after performing a grass dance. Power so perfectly described the scene I can hear the voices, taste the rain, and smell the damp old car even years after I read the passage.
I recommend this if you like Louise Erdrich's books, or have a liking of fantasy elements in literature.
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LibraryThing member A_Reader_of_Fictions
Right from the beginning, I knew that Susan Power's The Grass Dancer was a book I never would have picked up on my own. Though I'm generally up for reading about any culture, I've been burned by a couple about Native Americans, so I'm hesitant to read them. Still, that's not something I'm proud of
The Grass Dancer is a strange novel from a narrative perspective. Power uses multiple perspectives, varying from chapter to long chapter. Some of the perspectives are in third person and others in first. Since I read the book in chunks by chapter (seriously, they're long), I can't say for sure how unique the voices are in the first person chapters, but it pretty much all read like the same narrator to me. As such, I found the shifts in narration confusing.
Shifting from third to first person isn't all that weird though. Plenty of books do that. What not as many books do is jump around in time while switching perspectives. The book opens (with no year ascribed, then goes to 1981. From there, the narrative keeps jumping backwards years at a time, all the way to 1935, at which point it finally hops back to the early 1980s. WHUT.
Each chapter is a somewhat self-contained narrative and, taken individually, some of them were quite interesting and would have made decent books if built out more. Both the 1981 story, involving Pumpkin, one of the only female grass dancers and one of the best regardless of gender, and the 1964 story about Crystal Thunder, which is about her falling in love with a white man. Race and culture and identity and romance are the main themes, and I'm totally all for that. Some of the other narratives, the one of Red Dress most especially, bored me.
Taken as a whole, though, I have no freaking clue what to make of this book. Why did it go backward? Why make it so difficult for me to piece together how everyone's related? To follow this, I would have had to build out a family tree and keep track of names. As it is, I think I got the broad strokes, but missed the more subtle impacts the earlier timelines had on the later. Having finished, I really have no clue what I was meant to get out of this novel. What I consider the main plot, the frame story, seems, to me, unresolved and unsatisfying. Basically, I just don't get it.
So there you go. I don't think this was a book for me, and I don't think I did it justice because I am baffled.
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and is certainly no reason to write off all of those books, so, when this showed up in Sadie Hawkins, I figured I'd give it a try. While I didn't precisely dislike The Grass Dancer, I didn't really like it either, and I definitely did not understand it.The Grass Dancer is a strange novel from a narrative perspective. Power uses multiple perspectives, varying from chapter to long chapter. Some of the perspectives are in third person and others in first. Since I read the book in chunks by chapter (seriously, they're long), I can't say for sure how unique the voices are in the first person chapters, but it pretty much all read like the same narrator to me. As such, I found the shifts in narration confusing.
Shifting from third to first person isn't all that weird though. Plenty of books do that. What not as many books do is jump around in time while switching perspectives. The book opens (with no year ascribed, then goes to 1981. From there, the narrative keeps jumping backwards years at a time, all the way to 1935, at which point it finally hops back to the early 1980s. WHUT.
Each chapter is a somewhat self-contained narrative and, taken individually, some of them were quite interesting and would have made decent books if built out more. Both the 1981 story, involving Pumpkin, one of the only female grass dancers and one of the best regardless of gender, and the 1964 story about Crystal Thunder, which is about her falling in love with a white man. Race and culture and identity and romance are the main themes, and I'm totally all for that. Some of the other narratives, the one of Red Dress most especially, bored me.
Taken as a whole, though, I have no freaking clue what to make of this book. Why did it go backward? Why make it so difficult for me to piece together how everyone's related? To follow this, I would have had to build out a family tree and keep track of names. As it is, I think I got the broad strokes, but missed the more subtle impacts the earlier timelines had on the later. Having finished, I really have no clue what I was meant to get out of this novel. What I consider the main plot, the frame story, seems, to me, unresolved and unsatisfying. Basically, I just don't get it.
So there you go. I don't think this was a book for me, and I don't think I did it justice because I am baffled.
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LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
Grass Dancer doesn't have a plot. It doesn't have a main character. It doesn't have a linear timeline. At best, I would call it a mishmash of stories with interconnected characters, most from the same family. Grass Dancer as a whole is a shape shifter. With multiple points of view bouncing from
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first person to third and timelines that are all over the place (1981, 1964, 1935, and 1969 are important dates), it is hard to stay focused on the main purpose of the story. What I found most disheartening is that I would grow attached to a character (like Pumpkin) and then the story would move away from him or her. Most characters came back, but in impersonal ways. Wait until you read what happens to Pumpkin! This is not to say I didn't enjoy Power's writing. She inserted some surprises along the way that I wasn't expecting and she stayed true to the cultures, legends and myths of the Sioux Indians which I appreciated. Show Less
LibraryThing member BookConcierge
Native American tales told in reverse chronological order. Lots of myth and mysticism. Very interesting. I enjoyed it very much. I think it might make for a good book-group discussion.
LibraryThing member Cheryl_in_CC_NV
Challenging but worthwhile exploration of some of the historical, mystical, and generation influences on the Lakota of the northern plains. I've enclosed (in the copy I released via bookcrossing) printouts of a couple of brief reviews that I wish I'd read before I read the book as said reviews
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would've helped me understand what I was getting into better. Show Less
LibraryThing member flying_monkeys
So good!! I did not put this one down except to eat dinner. Full review to come.
4.5 stars
4.5 stars
LibraryThing member DrFuriosa
2.10.2019: this book is better on the re-read, because you can find rich details and tons of story threads that may have passed you by the first time. This is a beautifully melancholy book.
LibraryThing member m.belljackson
Woven with myths and legends, many of the intriguing stories are continually blindsided by cruel, mean, and evil Bad Magic.
Favorite characters are Harley Wind Soldier, Pumpkin, Herod Small War, and Chuck Norris.
The two kinds of Grass Dancing are fascinating: flatten the grass or move with
"You are the Medicine Hole" still a mystery.
Even more magic deaths skimmed after dog slaughter and feast.
Time sequences quite confusing.
Favorite characters are Harley Wind Soldier, Pumpkin, Herod Small War, and Chuck Norris.
The two kinds of Grass Dancing are fascinating: flatten the grass or move with
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spirit."You are the Medicine Hole" still a mystery.
Even more magic deaths skimmed after dog slaughter and feast.
Time sequences quite confusing.
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Subjects
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 1996)
PEN/Hemingway Award (Winner — 1995)
Best Fiction for Young Adults (Selection — 1995)
Notable Books List (1995)
ALA Outstanding Books for the College Bound (Fiction — 1999)
Original language
English
Original publication date
1994-08
Physical description
352 p.; 5.1 inches
ISBN
0425159531 / 9780425159538