Perma Red - Softcover

Debra Magpie Earling is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation. She teaches at the University of Montana in Missoula. This is her first novel.

*Starred Review* "When Louise White Elk was nine, Baptiste Yellow Knife blew a fine powder in her face and told her she would disappear." So begins a love story of uncommon depth and power, a love story that is as painful as it is transcendent, a love story in which the lovers, like Birkin and Ursula in Lawrence's Women in Love, are unwilling to diminish themselves in the act of joining together but are equally unable to turn away. Set in the years following World War II on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Earling's superb first novel throws two indomitable characters together in a tightly circumscribed world and gives them free rein to bang into the furniture and each other. A fiery mix of tantalizing contradictions, Louise is a red-haired temptress who yearns to escape the reservation and to experience every kind of freedom on the menu, but she can't avoid her magnetic attraction to Yellow Knife, whose devotion to the old ways and whose shaman-like intensity threaten to shackle Louise even as they offer their own kind of liberation. As they spar with each other--and with Charlie Kicking Woman, a tribal police officer also under Louise's spell--the lovers face both threats and temptations from the white world outside the reservation. Coming-of-age novels set on reservations are a rich part of contemporary literature, of course, and Earling's effort fits securely into the tradition of Welch, Erdrich, and others, but it stands on its own just fine. The Lawrentian psychodrama that emerges from the Louise-Baptiste relationship gives the novel a richness that transcends the story's time and place but that, simultaneously, brings the larger theme of cultural clash into even sharper focus. Let's hope we hear much more from Earling, who is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation. Bill Ott
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