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 verse" for every detail Longfellow took from Schoolcraft. Others have identified words from native languages included in the poem. Intentionally epic in scope, "The Song of Hiawatha" was described by its author as "this Indian Edda". But Thompson judged that despite Longfellow's claimed "chapter and verse" citations, the work "produce[s] a unity the original will not warrant," i.e., it is non-Indian in its totality. Thompson found close parallels in plot between the poem and its sources, with the major exception that Longfellow took legends told about multiple characters and substituted the character Hiawatha as the protagonist of them all. Resemblances