How long does it take to read The Night Watchman?
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich takes about 8 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 30 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2020. 464 pages, about 127,600 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 11 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 19 minutes |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Based on the extraordinary life of Louis Erdrich's grandfather Patrick Gourneau, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a literary master. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new "emancipation" bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn't about freedom: Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a "termination" that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans "for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run"? Since graduating from high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that pays barely enough to support her mother and younger brother. Patrice's alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children, and to bully Patrice for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn't been in touch in months and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence and endangers her life. Thomas and Patrice live in a reservation community. We also come to know young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother, Juggie Blue, and Patrice's best friend, Valentine, as well as Hay Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is…
Subjects: Fiction, cultural heritage, Indians of north america, fiction, North dakota, fiction, Indians of North America, Fiction, Ojibwa Indians
