The Sentence: A Novel

As a pandemic novel it is a sobbing read. It also looks at the murder of George Floyd's murder. I also learned a lot about Native American culture in the 21st century and cuturel appropriation as it applies to the Native American community. My favourite character in this book was the bookstore the novel Centres around based on a real life bookstore owned by the author.

Erdrich captures the way COVID interrupted all our narratives by interrupting the narrative at the center of this novel. It's a ghost story where the ghost is the least interesting character. I love Erdrich/Tookie's book selections and plan to use them to plan my next year of reading.

Louise Erdrich is one of if not my favorite writer. That being said, let me tell you that this book was a five-star read and will definitely be on the list of my favorite books of 2022. In this novel we follow Tookie, an indigenous woman who makes a dumb mistake and ends up going to prison. She is sentenced to 60 years. Her crime involves a dead body and transporting it across state lines but we get the feel right off the bat that Tookie is not a criminal, she is not a bad person, she was simply naive and was trying to help a friend. Everybody seems shocked by her crime and sentencing, only Tookie does not seem surprised. “I was on the wrong side of the statistics. Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned”. While in prison, Tookie reads as much as she can. Books become her salvation. But because of her tribe’s defense lawyer, her sentence is commuted and she is released from prison. Tookie then starts working at a local bookstore in Minneapolis, whose owner is a woman named Louise, and tries to rebuild her life. Erdrich lives in Minneapolis and also owns a bookstore much like the one in this novel. One of the customers of the bookstore is a white woman, who claims Native heritage, named Flora. But Flora suddenly passes away and her ghost refuses to leave the bookstore. That sort of sets off the ghost story in the book. But The Sentence is much more than just about an Indigenous woman or a haunted bookstore. It reflects on the city’s upheaval in 2020 amid the pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd. I loved how Erdrich portrayed the feeling of confusion at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, how scary it was when nobody knew exactly how it was transmitted, how it would change our lives. And in the middle of the pandemic, her city — and the whole country — is hammered by the terrible death of Jorge Floyd by the police, and with the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted everywhere. Will these events hunt us just like Flora haunted Tookie at the bookstore? This story takes you to so many unexpected places, I absolutely adored it. I am certain Louise Erdrich can write about everything under the sun. Her prose is absurdly beautiful. I also loved the book recommendations throughout the book and the list of books she provides at the end of the story. The Sentence has a little bit of everything: real issues, ghost story, mystery, a bookstore and book lovers. It is also on the longlist of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. I hope it wins. I highly recommend this book.

We read The Sentence in our Couples Book Club. Everyone enjoyed it and wanted to share their own ghost stories. All of us appreciated the list of the good reads from author Louise Erdrich at the end of her novel. We chose this book because we had read The Night Watchman which made us fans of this author. She writes beautifully and always has a good story to tell.

I liked that the hero and heroine were hard working, far from drop dead gorgeous people who shared a rare love. They're full of flaws, which they struggle to overcome. The traditions of their indigenous background is lightly worn. The story meanders here and there, but it kept me engaged enough to keep reading. The characters are well developed, the scary journey through Covid sharp. The author has a talent for description.