Irene and Gil’s marriage is crumbling, and their codependency leads them to constantly play mind games with each other. When Irene learns Gil has been reading her diary, she starts making things up to hurt him. She is also an alcoholic. Gil, an artist, works out his anger in portraits of his wife. He is also abusive. Each couple has moments where they try to piece things back together. Their three children are caught in the middle, unsure how to process what is happening around them.

I am a fan of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine novels and others set in the indigenous American community. But Shadow Tag, while well crafted, lacks the spark of her best-known work. I found it unbelievably depressing, and had it been a longer book I probably wouldn’t have finished it. ( )

She's a talented writer. All characters in this book are fundamentally flawed for reasons beyond their control. I didn't like anyone, even though I understood, a bit, why they acted how they did. I judged everyone pretty heavily, even though hopefully, I will never be in those situations. The end was so melodramatic and stupid that I laughed, surprised. That sounds absolutely horrible considering the content, but c'mon. It just screamed "the author is tired of this book and her characters." Some of the stuff in there was pretty racist towards Native Americans in general. "Native women choose carefully who they have their babies with, considering tribal enrollment"? I don't believe that for a second. Maybe I'll do research and be proven wrong, but seriously. Seriously. ( )

I've always had difficulty with her books. I found this one easier to read than the others I've tried. I read it for a book group so felt like I had to finish. It's a compelling, complicated story of some truly unlikable and dysfunctional people. ( )

This is a powerful book. The main characters have a love/hate relationship and I found the abusive marriage hard to take. I also think that the kids could have been developed a bit more. I did enjoy how the sections of the book kept getting shorter and shorter, so I was expecting some kind of blow-out ending, but I didn't predict the one that happened. Interesting take on artist and their subjects and I really liked the title, [Shadow Tag], and the how references to shadows carried throughout the book: giving the feeling of depth in paintings, standing still at high noon and having no shadow, being caught in the shadows, or lost in the shadow of genius, etc. ( )

Whew, this one is darned near a five-star book for me. When I started, it and had the feeling that it was going to be a sort of torrid diary-entry type book, I sort of groaned internally, but there turned out to be very little of that (and some of it quite good).

I don't have a personal basis for understanding how some of the characters in the book behave, though I've read this sort of account enough times by now to understand that people do behave in the, to me, bizarre, irrational, wild ways they behave.

Books that center on artists, as this one does in part, pretty routinely interest me.

It wasn't much of a struggle to connect this book to books like Lessing's much longer, less enjoyable The Golden Notebook and, oddly, Wallace's Infinite Jest (lots of weird parallels between the two -- a genius otter-like kid, dispomaniac parents, a volatile father whose volatility leads to a dire outcome, an essentially post-modern treatment complete with blurring of boundaries between kitsch and art, sky and water motifs, and probably more that I thought of while falling asleep last night and have since forgotten).

I read this one pretty quickly -- the first 66 pages in one evening and the remaining 185 or so on a missed-bedtime second evening because I was so into the book. Sometimes I do this because I just want to get through a book that isn't very appealing to me, but in this case, both the story and the prose kept me going. Because I read it in a hurry, I know I missed a lot of nuance in how the historic references and the bits about art interwove with themes in the modern day setting. The book surely merits a later, more careful, reading.

Erdrich pretty consistently writes prose that goes down easily and is at the same time lyrical, and this book is no exception. The closing passage is one of the finest (lyrically, rhythmically, and in how it evokes) closing passages I can recall reading in any book. ( )