The Birchbark Diaries

Dolls of Our Lives

Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney

Society & Culture, History

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Birchbark House has finally moved off the Patreon TBR list. This beautifully written novel by Louise Erdrich has been much requested by you, our listeners! Set in 1847, The Birchbark House is a story about an Ojibwa girl named Omakayas. Throughout the book, we spend several seasons with Omakayas and her kin as they weather a smallpox outbreak. Omakayas learns more about her own history and starts to see herself as a healer. We discuss Erdrich's beautiful writing, how this book connects to themes in American Girl books, and why this widely acclaimed book ought to have a place on your shelf.

Original air date: August 27, 2022

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to American Girls the podcast. This is the show where we're
0:14.0	reliving the American Girls series book by book except here on Patreon where we're
0:18.6	doing pretty much whatever you want or we want at any given time. I'm Mary. I'm still Allison.
0:26.0	And today Allison we're coming together to discuss a book that I get I think this has
0:31.6	been recommended to us and it's definitely been on our list for a while.
0:36.0	This is a book that we have been talking about since we did the Kaya episode so this has been more than a year in process. We talked about how much we loved reading books such as the Prairie Lotus, which kind of let us look at American indigenous history from a totally new fresh perspective.
0:56.2	And today we are reading the Birch Bark House, which is by Louise Erdrich, and it was a National Book Award finalist and it's on just about every list you can
1:06.0	imagine for sort of top books to put on a young person shelf to give them a better
1:11.4	kind of like better view of United States history.
1:14.8	Yeah completely this was really a fascinating read and I'm really excited to get into it.
1:20.8	Before we do that we just wanted to make an announcement about
1:23.8	another Patreon activity that we're also very excited about coming up.
1:27.7	Yeah, so we have been talking for a while that we want to keep watch-alongs going.
1:32.2	A lot of you joined us for Dick back in June of 2022 and we were kind of going
1:37.4	through our 1970s phase we are going to now move over to a Strise and, you know, Feldman era by doing a watch along of the original funny girl.
1:49.5	And we've been posting polls because we want to make sure that these are at times that you're able to join us.
1:55.2	Like the discord is great because you can participate in there anyway, anytime, you know,
2:00.8	share your cat pictures, your mini mini pictures talk about your favorite show the
2:05.0	watch along we do kind of have to pick a time or a few times to get together to do it
2:10.4	so your feedback really helps us to make it so that as many people who want to
2:15.2	participate can come and do that.
2:17.2	Yeah, completely. And I think it's our ambition that we have like a group watch
	...

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