knows what's right for Shawnee Ray. Style According to critic Rose Hsiu-Li Juan, the stylistic technique Erdrich uses in The Bingo Palace combines the magical realism of Anishinaabe culture with historical events. For example, characters such as Fleur are able to transform into animals when they need to. Animals also talk in the novel and deliver important messages to characters including Lipsha. Erdrich employs parallelism by linking the events in her book to historical events; for example, Kristan Sarvé-Gorham outlines how her motifs of gambling are directly correlated with the legalization of American Indian gambling. Public Reception Popular Pam Houston gives praise for the novel's “commitment to objective observation that records each emotional event entirely.” Houston also finds The Bingo Palace to be full of “stoic wisdom” and has the “honest and exquisite rhythms readers look for in Erdrich's prose.” Houston and other reviews agree that the novel is Erdrich's most exciting because of the character Lipsha's traditional wisdom that is mixed with his modern passion and love. The Bingo Palace received criticism for the latter half of the novel and the role of the character Gerry. Michael Boylan takes issue with later chapters, claiming the ending to be “unsatisfactory,” and “does not fit with the story as presented earlier.” Lawrence Thornton criticized that Lipsha's journey in the novel is turned into “a wildly improbable madcap chase,” and “[skews] the novel's focus." Scholarly The novel was well received by Indigenous literature scholars for its use of Lipsha's struggle with the "tenets of Western ideology." Jonathan Wilson notes that Lipsha's struggle leads him into "circles of cultural/economic bankruptcy, rebirth, and eventually home." Emphasis is also given to the characters' redefining of home under the presence of forces like capitalism that merge or ostracize ideologies. Scholars such as John Carlos Rowe agree with Wilson and look to Erdrich's mixture of identity for his theories within Postcolonial literary studies. Rowe specifies that Erdrich's writing of Lipsha's struggle should be understood as "postcolonial studies in their own right." Publication History A hardcover edition of the novel was published by HarperCollins in 1994. The Harper Perennial edition was reissued in 2006 and 2017. Prior to the novel's initial publication in 1994, three of the chapters appeared as short stories in the following: Chapter Seven as “The Bingo Van” in The New Yorker in February 1990. Chapter Twenty-four as “I'm a Mad Dog Biting Myself for