Ceremony

It was beautiful. This was a copy I was borrowing from someone who read it for school. I am thankful it came into her path so it could come into mine.

Very good writing, but I didn't really like the story, it skipped around a lot and was hard to follow until about the last third or so. I hate to give it two stars because her writing is really very good, but I just didn't like this book.

On one hand, Ceremony is a well-told tale and an intriguing story. It is the kind of story that hasn't been told enough and so needs to exist. On the other, Ceremony is a cerebral read that feels slightly inauthentic and is arranged in a jarring manner (flashbacks galore) that makes the story difficult to follow. This is one of those novels that I didn't always understand what was going on (or when in the story it was taking place), but it had a way of getting under my skin that I couldn't shake. Ceremony is intense and gritty, but not the easiest of reads.

As a fan of contemporary Native American fiction (is it pretentious to say that??), reading this for the first time now was interesting, since it definitely paved the way for writers like Louise Erdrich. Standing on its own, now, it's maybe not as “fresh” as it was 30 years ago–I feel like I've read these kinds of “rediscovering native culture/reclamation/rebirth” themes before. (Not that that's Silko's fault; she came first, I'm reading out of order.) But still, I enjoyed her prose, and especially the way the different stories flowed together so seamlessly. Also, I loved her descriptions of the Southwest landscape–gorgeous.