Perma Red

Louise White Elk is, like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and Antonia Shimerda in My Antonia, the sort of literary heroine whose magnetic allure draws the entire plot of a book around her like iron filings (she's "the girl we had all stood taller for," says one admirer). Does it do her much good to be so desired, and pursued by three flawed suitors? No, quite the opposite, but the same life force that draws these men toward her (and will likely draw you, the reader, as well) carries her (and you) through this story of pain and violence, set during a brutal winter on Montana's Flathead Reservation in the 1940s.