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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780425159538
ISBN number: 0425159531
Label: Berkley Trade
Manufacturer: Berkley Trade
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: April 01, 1997
Publishing house: Berkley Trade
Sale Popularity Level: 85585
Studio: Berkley Trade
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Inspired by the lore of her Sioux heritage, this critically-acclaimed novel from Susan Power weaves the stories of the old and the young, of broken families, romantic rivals, men and women in love and at war. Revealing the harsh price of unfulfilled longings and the healing power of mystery and hope, The Grass Dancer takes readers on a journey through past and present-in a tale as resonant and haunting as an ancestor's memory, and as promising as a child's dream.
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Rated by buyers 
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Sometimes the best intentions at innovative approaches result in something akin to torture. I suspect that Susan Power was envisioning a novel approach to the NA Novel genre. Instead, she sold herself short - and her readers along with her. It was expertly crafted short stories disconnectedly telling differing tales of the same connected story lines, some without resolution and some surprisingly with. Obvious talent such as this should not have as its supreme result a book so unworthy of representing the author. Let us pray she fixes these flaws and continues to hone her amazing story telling gift.
Rated by buyers 
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Power certainly does not make this an easy read. At very first glance you can read through it and be happy, then you start really reading it, and it never ends! There are so many messages in this book than I care to count, and our class disected this book till I wanted to puke. However, in defence of Power, it was well written and if I had read on my own, not only would my knowledge of Native American life been increased dramatically, I would have enjoyed it!
I have also met Power, very nice woman, and she can most certainly tell a story.
Rated by buyers 
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The editorial and other customer reviews do a good job of covering the characters and basic plot, so I won't go into that.
This has to be the best book I've read in months. It's practically lyrical, the sentences are so pretty. The dust jacket is more than a little off on the plot, so don't read that. It's a collection of self contained stories about a messed up family living on a reservation in North Dakota.
Each story is narrated by a different person and takes place a random number of years before the last one. The effect is that each new chapter gives you a different understanding of the events in the previous chapters, until you get back to the "present" time from the very first chapter, where you have a completely new take on everyone involved.
It's unusual to find a short story collection this good from such a new author. I highly recommend it.
Rated by buyers -
This is an interesting book that gives us a series of stories about Sioux spirituality. The stories are loosely interconnected with each other and tell of people who maintain an ability to employ a sort of grey magic. With this "gift" they communicate with past generations, conjure up love potions, compel others to self destruction, and other bizarre phenomena. Within these stories is a generally clear view of life in a modern day Indian reservation. The author, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation who grew up in Chicago, gives an inside view of a live fairly removed from mainstream America. I got the feeling that there was a fair amount of autobiographical material included in these stories.
I was prepared to give this book a "3 Star" rating until I noticed how well the author pulled things together towards the end. I had made the mistake of reading the book one story at a time spaced in between my other reading. I finished the last third of the book in a day's time and was able to catch the inter-relationships of the stories. Still, I was not as drawn into the spiritual magic as others may be. I don't discredit this phenomena but I suspect there are others who will get more out of the book than I did. I did enjoy a lot of the local flavor. I don't ever recall seeing any other novel that mentioned my wife's hometown of Mandaree, North Dakota. I have come to appreciate that there is a real element of spiritual magic through her Hidatsa/Mandan roots. Of the many stories and incidents that she has shared with me, I do vividly recall the night after her mother's funeral. My wife expressed her aprehension about going to bed that night because she was sure her mother's spirit would come to visit. That night, about 2AM, our house dog started barking. He never barks indoors at night and, when I got up to look around, nothing explained his outburst. I was puzzled, my wife wasn't. Susan Powers shares a lot of this in "The Grass Dancer" but on a much larger scale.
Rated by buyers -
Susan Power's THE GRASS DANCER, although billed as a novel, is a series of tightly bound stories centered around the thematic core of a Sioux myth. Separately, these stories, many of which have been previously published in high-quality magazines such as The Atlantic and The Paris Review, are excellent, but read as a whole, one after the other, they form a powerful whole - a novel, if you will. The world Ms. Power creates it at once current and ancient, with legends and tales of ancestors so entwined with the present day that the Native American characters seem less like individuals and more like highlighted segments on a multi-branched and infinitely continuing time line. But that is not to say that Ms. Power creates simple characters. Her people are complex and often troubled, struggling with the magic that swirls around them.
The individual stories tell the larger one of Native Americans, in particular the Sioux, and their battles, both physical and metaphysical, with the white men who invaded their land. This is not a historical novel, however, but rather a lyrically psychological one, where myth becomes fact. The pivotal legend that embraces all the characters in The Grass Dancer is the one of Red Dress, a Sioux woman with breath the scent of plums and a spirit that guides a long line of women to their destinies, both tragic and exhilarating. Charlene, a direct descendent from Red Dress, is in love with Harley, a descendent of Red Dress's husband Ghost Horse. But Harley keeps in his heart the spirit of another woman. Charlene's grandmother, Mercury, uses Red Dress's magic to control men and to wrest Charlene from her mother. Lydia, who is mute by choice, survives her husband and son, dead because of her anger with the magic of Red Dress. The magic in this novel has such force that when Red Dress finally tells her own story, we cannot wait to see what kind of mortal she was that gave rise to such spiritual power. Sadly, the Red Dress story is the weakest of the book. Her motivation to lure white men to their deaths, ultimately bringing on her own, seems flimsy. However, Red Dress as a spirit has become so poignant through the other stories that her final appearance in the novel is perhaps one of the most moving passages.
Susan Power is an extraordinarily gifted writer with a taste for language that makes a reader want to linger over her words. Her imagination is so precise that it is difficult to accept that her characters do not exist beyond the pages.
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