Winona's Web: A Novel of Discovery Book

Eh. I found this book kind of clicheed, and hard to keep picking up after a while. The main character, Meggie, is a recently divorced psychologist who has relocated to a small town in northern Michigan. Her new client, Winona, is a sixty-something Native American woman who has informed her family that she is to die in two months, although she is in good health. Concerned about Winona's apparent suicidality, her daughter Lucy shleps her to Meggie's office, beginning a patient-therapist relationship where it rapidly becomes unclear exactly who the healer is.

As a beginning psychologist, I was excited to read a novel about a patient and therapist, particularly one where the patient was a challenging one. Overall, though, the novel disappointed me. Winona's frequent digressions into Native American wisdom sounded like recycled Zen claptrap from other novels (you know, the ones where the derailed main character meets some wise, sage-like character whose sound bytes conveniently return him to a more fulfilling and productive life path) and it didn't take me long to get to the point where I was automatically skimming them in the interest of moving forward in the story. It was apparent to me, especially given the author's background (a psychologist who's also a sweat-lodge practitioner and teacher of workshops on Native American multiculturalism, married to a Cherokee), that this "novel of discovery" (that subtitle in itself should have been a tip-off -- since when is "novel of discovery" an actual sub-genre? Aren't most novels about some kind of discovery?) was meant to be a paean to Native American culture. Hey -- I have nothing against Native American culture, but I do have something against agenda-driven novels. Whether the novel's agenda is to praise or condemn, the results are the same -- clicheed, predictable plot, flat characters, mediocre writing at best.

Anyway, my harsh review notwithstanding, I do want to express my gratitude to Mintzi who left this book here for me to read. Even if I didn't enjoy the book itself, I genuinely appreciate it when people who visit bring me reading material which is so hard to come by here.