The Beet Queen

Two siblings, Karl and Mary Adare, step off a boxcar in Argus, North Dakota, one spring morning in 1932. Mary, left alone after a strange turn of events, finds shelter with an aunt and uncle who run a butcher shop, while Karl moves on by rail. The novel follows the lives that unfold around them over roughly four decades. Mary is an ordinary, unassuming woman whose quiet presence gradually reshapes those around her. Karl is charming and easily tempted, and lacks his sister's knack for getting by. Their troubled cousin Sita and Celestine James, a young woman of mixed Native American ancestry who becomes Mary's closest friend, round out the cast. The book explores how family bonds endure, the uncanny power of nature, and the mysteries that lie at the heart of being human. Erdrich, who is of Ojibwe descent, wrote it in the mid-1980s, and it shares its setting and community with her earlier novel Love Medicine.