future home of the living god book review

We follow Cedar through her capture, institutional confinement, and escape and pick up fragments of what’s happening-using a credit card risks being tracked prisons are now for pregnant women Womb Volunteers are now forced to gestate “liberated” embryos street names have been changed to Bible verses-all this while watching Cedar negotiate her relationships with both families. Those turning in a pregnant woman (tip line: Unborn Protection Society) receive an award those who refuse to provide information are tortured.

It is now a crime to harbor or help a pregnant woman. Cedar, whose pregnancy is now showing, is confined to her house because pregnant women are being seized by officers right off the streets under an extension of the Patriot Act. There is a looming apocalypse, and it may include evolutionary reversal. She’s writing to her future child, and the reader knows only what Cedar knows, which is very little since the community soon suffers a news blackout and can only exchange rumors. The reviews five years ago were mixed, but I wondered what it would be like to read this story of the capture and confinement of pregnant women now-post- Roe.Ĭedar is a pregnant twenty-six-year-old woman living in Minneapolis near both her white adoptive parents and her Ojibwe birth mother. In August, while browsing secondhand books, I picked up Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), a novel I had skipped, despite my love of her work. It was June 14, 2022, and we were already living post- Roe, in a state that had weeks earlier earned the NPR headline “Oklahoma Governor Signs the Strictest Abortion Ban.” When an antiabortion activist scaled the fifty-story Devon skyscraper in downtown Oklahoma City, I wondered less why someone would take such an outlandish risk and more why someone would think to come to this state, of all states, to make his statement. I LIVE IN Oklahoma, one of the reddest states in these United States. The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is happening. Louise Erdrich Future Home of the Living God

Future home of the living god book review