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 between the original stories, as "reshaped by Schoolcraft," and the episodes in the poem are but superficial, and Longfellow omits important details essential to Ojibwe narrative construction, characterization, and theme. This is the case even with "Hiawatha’s Fishing," the episode closest to its source. Some important parts of the poem were more or less Longfellow's invention from fragments or his imagination. "The courtship of Hiawatha and Minnehaha, the least 'Indian' of any of the events in "Hiawatha", has come for many readers to stand as the typical American Indian tale." Also, "in exercising the function of selecting incidents to make