The Round House

The Round House (2013) by Louise Erdrich. Set in the 1980s on an Indian reservation in North Dakota, this is a book about justice and about a 13-year-old Ojibwe boy who seeks said justice for his mother, who has been sexually assaulted in a tribal building known as the Round House. As it works out, she was assaulted by a white man, who appears virtually immune from prosecution due to laws governing native American justice. But Joe, the Ojibwe boy, and his friends do some investigating on their own, and they are soon sure they know who perpetrated the heinous crime. They can't find justice through the legal system, so they seek their own kind of rough justice -- at great emotional cost to themselves. This is an excellent book, which gets inside the mind of a 13-year-old boy and the legal barriers faced by native Americans. It deserves to be read by a wide audience. Grade: A-