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Book Review of The Snake Game

The Snake Game
The Snake Game
Author: Wayne Johnson
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Hardcover
reviewed on + 117 more book reviews


The Snake Game is a deeply disturbing, deeply moving novel, it's characters drawn with an exacting eye and placed in a perfectly rendered world- both physical and emotional. It is a striking powerful novelistic debut.

The time is our own- the 1950's to the 1980's. The place is a vast, remote tract of dense pine forest and deep lakes along the Minnesota/Canada border- Big Pines, sacred Ojibway and Chippewa ground arrogated by the white government. Here, what was once the sanctuary of the Indians "old life" is now a graveyard, the only monument to it, a white-owned sportsmen's lodge where the indians' inherited knowledge of the land and waters make them valuable guides. Follows the lifes of three generations of Ojibway and Chippewa.