The Sentence Review

In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.

Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

General Impressions

I requested "The Sentence" because I read the words "ghost" and "bookshop" and that was enough for me. I had never heard the author's name until I got the book at home and I was not aware of the buzz around this story so I was not at all prepared for the literary masterpiece I was about to read.

This book is written by an Indigenous author and follows a cast of likewise Indigenous characters, the most important of which is Tookie, a middle-aged former convict who is one of the booksellers at Birchbark Books, an independent bookshop focusing on Indigenous works and art. That is not where the story starts though.

We are first introduced to Tookie about a decade before the haunting when she is a young woman, toeing or sometimes even on the wrong side of the law. After unknowingly moving drugs across state lines and being forced to give a confession under duress, she is given a disproportionally long sentence and ends up in prison.

What follows is a description of the abuse she is subjected to during her incarceration on a personal and systematic level. Tookie is released early thanks to the people outside that never gave up on her but even then, she has lost ten years of her life and acquired a lot of trauma. Still, she tries to deal with it by building a life, getting a job at a bookshop, marrying and becoming part of a loving, supportive Indigenous community.

That peaceful existence is often cracked by the resurface of Tookie's trauma and then by the events of 2020, both the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and police brutality.

The ghost and haunting itself end up being only a part of the novel and everything that is happening in Tookie's world but it still speaks to Indigenous identity and the way it is tokenized by the white world at large.

Conclusions

This is one of those books that you read again and again and take something from it at every turn. It was wonderful not only to read a book by an indigenous author (that is a secondary character in this book) but to learn so much about the culture.

This was a novel about such recent and deep hurts but it was also a beautiful love letter to stories, books, community and independent bookshops and I'll always remember it.

Thank you to Corsair and Little Brown Book for sending me this ARC.

Rating: 5/5