The Beet Queen :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Louise Erdrich, the author of The Beet Queen, is the oldest of seven children. Erdrich, was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, on June 7, 1954. The daughter of a French Ojibwe mother and German American father, Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Erdrich's large extended family lived nearby, affecting her writing life from an early age. Her father introduced Louise to William Shakespeare's plays and encouraged Louise and her sisters to write their own stories. Erdrich attended college at Dartmouth and John Hopkins before marrying author and anthropologist Michael Dorris. When she married Dorris, he had three adopted children and later the couple had three more children of their own. When the two separated in 1995, Erdrich moved six blocks down the street in order to share custody of their children. On March 29, 1997 Dorris committed suicide. Erdrich now lives in Minneapolis, MN with her three children.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  On a spring morning in 1932, Mary age eleven and Karl Adare age fourteen arrive in Argus, North Dakota. Having parted and going separate ways Mary having gone to live with her aunt, while Karl goes on to explore and live on the wilder side. These children were orphaned in a strange way; their mother took off with an airplane stuntman. Haunted by disturbing images of her mother, Mary seeks refuge and stays with her mother's sister Fritzie, which with her husband Pete, run a butcher shop. This begins the forty-year saga of abandonment and unstinting love.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The novel, The Beet Queen, deals with the elements involved to create plot movement. First off is exposition, since every chapter in The Beet Queen is narrated by a different character in the book it tells the story of each character in first person and in great detail chapter by chapter. It tells you the story from their point of view. It is very effective it allows you to be in their mind thinking along with them seeing what they are going through and feeling. At the conclusion of each chapter you want to keep reading to see what will happen to a specific character when it is there turn to narrate again. One event in The Beet Queen is when Sita is put into a psycho ward because she pretended to lose her voice, and ever since then her neighbors and everyone she came in contact with would have to read her lips.