Babies Today Book Review:

The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

By Louise Erdrich review by Jillian Hanson

The Blue Jay's Dance by Louise Erdrich is a personal journal of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. As the story of Erdrich's pregnancy unfolds, so does a rich narrative of her life as a writer and one who lives in close harmony with the earth. Erdrich, who is better known for her contemporary fiction, has created in this book a lyrical, wise space in which she contemplates the many facets of her work as a woman — her writing, her laboring, her mothering — as a synthesized whole.

Dreams, marriage, death, writing, birth and feminism are all seamlessly interwoven with traditional Ojibwa gardening tips, the observed habits of woodchucks, and the effects of sleep deprivation. There are even a few recipes sprinkled here and there of foods to satisfy the strange cravings of pregnancy, such as her polish grandmother's pierogies, an all licorice dinner, and lemon meringue pie.

Her writing style is sometimes philosophical, sometimes spiritual and other times physical. Often it is all three.

"Every birth is profoundly original and yet plotted a billion times, too many times. We move into the narrative with medical advice and technological assistance and frail human hopes, and yet we often find ourselves inadequately shaped by culture, by family, by each other for the scope of the work. The task requires mystical tools and helpers... some push once, some don't push at all, some push in pleasure some not and some, like me, for hours. We wreak havoc, make animal faces, ugly bare-toothed faces, go red, go darker, whiter, stranger, turn to bears. We choke spouses, beat nurses, beg them, beg doctors, weep and focus. It is our work, our body's work that is involved in its own goodness. For, even though it wants at times to lie down and quit, the body is an honest hard-working marvel that gives everything to this one task."

This book is holistically and powerfully feminine. In a lush, wandering voice, Erdrich simultaneously gazes forward to her baby's future and backward at her beloved ancestors. She shows how the many different faces of a woman merge into one whole that mirrors and reflects the experience of all women. Erdrich maintains that all of our work — the artistic and the mundane — is the same, is good work. Most women, mothers or not, writers or not, will see some part of themselves reflected in this book.