The Blue Jay's Dance

By Louise Erdrich,

Book cover of The Blue Jay's Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood

Book description

New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s moving meditation on the experience of motherhood—the first nonfiction work by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.

Louise Erdrich’s first major work of nonfiction, The Blue Jay’s Dance, brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked The Blue Jay's Dance as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

After the birth of my second and third children (twins!), I felt further than ever from my dreams of being a nature writer. Even the natural world outside my window seemed impossibly far away while I was indoors, contending with the demands of two babies and a preschooler.

When those babies were about two years old, I discovered, by accident, this book, and my life changed. In its pages, Louise Erdrich showed that careful attention to and contemplation of the natural world was not only possible for mothers of small children but that motherhood itself can make us more attuned…

From Andrea's list on women in the wild.

This book features somewhat marginally in my book, but my copy of it is dog-eared and never far from my reading pile and it deserves a place in my top five. 

The book chronicles the twelve-month period of one of Louise Erdrich’s pregnancies and experiences of new motherhood and it is rich in insight and full of marvelous turns of phrase. I particularly admire the book’s stylistic freedom (Erdrich drops in recipes for fennel risotto without much explanation). 

That freedom, both precise and dynamic, seems to capture some truth about birth as an experience: its exact demands and vigorous…

The Blue Jay’s Dance is Louise Erdrich’s first memoir—a chronicle of a year of mothering and writing. I gobbled up this book when I was pregnant with my own first child, wanting to know how a writer I so admired managed two utterly consuming tasks so successfully. Erdrich kept a cradle in her writing studio and would write while the baby slept in the same room—an idyllic scene that gave me hope during my own first pregnancy that my writing life might still continue post-baby (turns out it’s a tad more complicated than where you put the cradle). One wise…

A Diary in the Age of Water

By Nina Munteanu,

Book cover of A Diary in the Age of Water

Nina Munteanu Author Of Darwin's Paradox

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Writer Ecologist Mother Teacher Explorer

Nina's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.

Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.

A Diary in the Age of Water

By Nina Munteanu,

What is this book about?

Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…


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