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Title details for The Blue Jay's Dance by Louise Erdrich - Wait list

The Blue Jay's Dance

A Memoir of Early Motherhood

Audiobook
Pre-release: Expected January 15, 2026
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: Not available
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: Not available

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 and insights, and the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions the acclaimed author experienced in the course of one twelve—month period—from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to her return to writing in the fall. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and small events that every parent will recognize and appreciate.

"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."People

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 3, 1995
      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.''


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