SOURCE: "The Girl Columbus Discovered," in The New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1992, p. 33.

[In the following review, McDermott considers the family values extolled in Morning Girl.]

Christopher Columbus is a mere postscript in Morning Girl, a lovely novel by the author of A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, The Broken Cord and, with Louise Erdrich, The Crown of Columbus. There is evidence of him only in the final pages, when a group of squat strangers who "had wrapped every part of their bodies with colorful leaves and cotton" approach a Bahaman island in a fat canoe. His name itself appears only in the epilogue: a brief excerpt from his diaries in which he mentions seeing only one "quite young girl" among the people who greet his ships.

It is this young girl, Morning Girl; her brother, Star Boy; their family, and the life of their people in...