By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee of the novel is 19-year-old Maud Slivenowicz, whose major source of knowledge is "Reader's Digest". Her mother, Evangeline, has five children by five different deadbeat fathers. Without a regular income, the Slivenowicz family dream of becoming movie stars, and at the end of the book it seems one of Maud's brothers might actually be given a role in a television commercial. The title of the book relates to a famous line in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha". By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee (1996) is a satirical novel by Tama
The Song of Hiawatha what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of "The Song of Hiawatha". Having then distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject." A poem of some 200 lines, it describes Hiawatha's attempts to photograph the members of a pretentious middle-class family ending in disaster. 1865 saw the Scottish-born immigrant James Linen's "San Francisco (in imitation