Bookn' with Friends will meet at 6:30pm on Monday, June 30 for a discussion on their June book, The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich. Selected for the 2025 Reading Challenge "a book with a color in the title," The Mighty Red is a PEN/Faulkner Fiction nominee for 2025. Released in 2024, it is an ambitious and long-reaching exploration of the impact of human relationships - on each other, on the land, and on ourselves.
From the publisher:
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.
Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.
Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.
Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.
The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.
You may also like the following events from Winfield Public Library • Winfield, KS:
![Bookn' with Friends: "The Mighty Red" by Louise Erdrich, 30 June | Event in Winfield | AllEvents](https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events1/banners/485ffb3a04ea33ab1575a9eed1955e4a0fe7b81338494ea32abb5ad216610748-rimg-w1200-h675-dcffffff-gmir?v=1750107782 "Bookn with Friends: "The Mighty Red" by Louise Erdrich, 605 College St, Winfield, KS, United States, Kansas 67156, 30 June 2025 | AllEvents | AllEvents")
