The Grass Dancer Essay | Critical Essay #3

The Grass Dancer Critical Essay #3

In the following review, McIllroy calls The Grass Dancer a "weaving of spells, passions, spirituality and history, " and says Power exhibits an "understanding that allows compassion for white and Indian."

Readers of Susan Power's extravagantly inventive, intellectually rigorous first novel, The Grass Dancer, will recognize the now-familiar territory of magic realism, but they will find themselves in a distinctively Native-American province. In Power's fictional world of the Dakota (Sioux), magic is cold fact, as much as a thundercloud or Formica tabletop. It is the "potent blood"—or "bad medicine"—of Mercury Thunder, reservation witch, that drives people to act, as much as the more conventional elements of human psychology.

The author, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, uses two tragic auto accidents as our entry into this weaving of spells, passions, spirituality and history.

In the prologue, a drunken white, distraught over his girlfriend's affair with...
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