The Dance Boots: Stories (Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction Series)

Simply mesmerizing.
–??Booklist

Linda LeGarde Grover knows how to end a story???and manages to achieve both circularity and closure in each and every one. This is an impressive feat in and of itself, but for a collection of linked stories like??The Dance Boots, which twist and tie and loop back on one another, the achievement is even more remarkable.
–??ForeWord Reviews

A bright and determined vitality.
–??Publishers Weekly

With stunning sentences and other stylistic elements reminiscent of Hemingway, Wolfe, Tan and others, this collection dazzles with its complex characters, rustic settings, and authentic situations.
–??Dark Sky??magazine

The powerful Ojibwe women in Linda LeGarde Grover???s??Dance Boots??tell stories in ‘the rhythm and pattern of repeating and echoing, re-echoing and returning,’ the pattern that keeps them strong. They need to be strong in the face of a terrible monster, one no less ferocious than those in Ojibwe traditional tales, one that steals children and returns them altered, alien, broken: the boarding schools. These are stories of survival as well, and as we follow the rhythm of her narrative we find ourselves joining the dance of a culture resurgent, a dance that returns lost children, that begins to heal a world.
Heid E. Erdrich ?????Author of??National Monuments

Grover???s sense of character and setting in these stories is so immediate, so vital. She has put the Mozhay Point Indian Reservation on the literary map.
— Geary Hobson ?????Author of??The Last of the Ofos

Grover neither sentimentalizes nor victimizes indigenous people but rather shows them as the complex humans they are.
–??Minnesota Reads

In eight beautifully crafted Ojibwe stories, Grover???s characters, members of the LaForce family, learn to survive Indian boarding school, a brutal marriage, and even how to set pins in a bowling alley all the while taking care to remember the ancestors and the road home. Whether home is the mythic Mozhay Point Indian Reservation, a clapboard house, or a horse paradise of woods near Duluth, Minnesota, Grover???s??The Dance Boots??is an Ojibwe jingle dance that bounced me off the page, and back on again. A wonderful read!
— LeAnne Howe ?????Author of??Shell Shaker??and??Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

Through her first-person stories, told in the voices of Ojibwe men or women, Grover leads readers to better understand what they have never experienced.
?????Indian Country Today