The Mighty Red
Kismet Poe is a former goth, high school senior and beautiful brainiac. In her, farmwife Winnie Geist finds the angel who calms her son, Gary, the quarterback of the local high school football team in Argus, North Dakota. He has an attraction to risk.
Argus is nestled near an oxbow of the Red River, a large puzzle piece in the breadbasket of North America. The Argus boys play football for each other, rather than for their lackluster coach. Months earlier, nearly the entire football team was involved in a snowmobiling accident on the Geist’s farmland. The people of Argus whisper about this but never in front of the Geists. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets from the Geist’s family farm to the processing plant. Crystal’s husband, Martin Poe, works as a traveling high school theater instructor. After college, the couple followed sugar beet work to Argus. Crystal worries about Kismet dating Gary, and Martin secretly frets about the developing banking crisis. It is late in fall 2008. Martin has been investing the parish renovation funds for Father Flirty. Their worries and fears are not for naught.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Louise Erdrich has crafted a brilliant, humorous novel in The Mighty Red. She weaves the science of farming, the Shakespearean drama of high school life and the love that mothers feel for their children into this phenomenal book.
Maureen Millea Smith is a retired librarian and a Minnesota Book Award winning novelist.
