The Beet Queen was a very interesting and challenging book to read. The book consists of four parts with sixteen total chapters. Each “part” is broken at significant breaks or lapses of time in the book. The chapters are separated a little differently however. Each chapter has a different character narrating the events of the book in a first person form. Then, all of the chapters are followed by an omnisent third person narrating a …showed first 75 words of 682 total…

…showed last 75 words of 682 total…oh let’s just say Benjy in Faulkner’s novel. That paradigmatic book was difficult to read because of the abstractness of the novel and it’s frequent jumps back and forth in time. Overall, I greatly enjoyed this novel. Erdrich’s style of writing complimented my thinking processes and made the novel more enjoyable. While the challenge was still there, it helped me that the story greatly followed Bonnycastle’s notion of syntagmatic thinking.