In a small farming town in North Dakota, sugar beet farming is almost as much everybody’s livelihood as keeping track of one’s neighbor’s business. Kismet, a high school senior, receives a marriage proposal from the star of the football team, Gary Geist. Crystal, Kismet’s mother disapproves, but Kismet is more like her mother than either wishes to acknowledge and will probably go through with the wedding. Gary is what you’d expect of an 18-year-old football player, which makes this book so captivating. Gary, Kismet, and their high school group of friends are on the verge of adulthood yet still saddled with the judgement skills of adolescents.
Bad things, and good things, happen while we readers sit as silent flies on walls in half a dozen homes. Parents navigate their jobs, their spouses, their prying and supportive friends, their finances, loving their children, and letting them go. All of Erdrich’s characters, like all of us, are colored in varying and changing shades of goodwill and shortcomings. In the background, the call of agro-capitalism is keeping the small town alive while farmers lose topsoil and nature succumbs to the over-application of farm chemicals.