The Sentence

Beautiful. Funny. Important. "The Door is Open. Go."

I picked The Sentence as my first spooky season read because it's a ghost story. It's not a ghost story like any I've encountered before, though. The protagonist, Tookie, is arrested for moving a dead body, an act that haunts her even after her release and happy marriage to her arresting officer. (Yes, really.) But that metaphorical haunting encounters a real one. Now working at a bookshop, Tookie can't shake a dead patron who simple will not leave the store or her alone. This original tale is told against the backdrop of world-altering events in 2020, including the Covid pandemic… show more.

I have been reading Louise Erdrich's books for a long time, and I feel like you can see these arcs of her writing evolve. So far, The Sentence is my favorite. Why?

Partly because it starts with the absurdity of a well-meaning body snatch. How do you get better than that? Because when you first meet Tookie, she is an addict--maybe of substances, but mostly an addict of users. Her mother was an addict, so it's no small wonder that she finds herself wanting emotionally unavailable women. She goes to jail--framed by the two women who asked her to be… show more.

Another of my favorite authors, Erdrich, also has a big social and environmental justice theme throughout her works. There’s a delightful premise—a ghost haunts a bookstore in Minneapolis, and a mystery must be solved!—but it also takes on very serious subjects.

Set in 2019-2020, it covers the race riots, pandemic stress, and social justice issues. One thing I love is a book that has a seriousness of purpose but is still truly joyful and fun to read.  

I love so many things about this book, starting with the title (double-entendre!) and the setting (bookstore!).

I love the snippets of real life (e.g., it’s the author’s bookstore). And then there’s the ghost, Flora. Erdrich does such a good job with Flora. This is not the movie Ghostbusters and it’s not the TV show Ghosts. Flora is just an unseen character, a former customer who keeps hanging out in the bookstore in the time of Covid. Erdrich weaves both Covid and the ghost into the story so smoothly—the book is not about either one of them, but they are… show more.

The book is sparkling with a great sense of humor, and it starts off as a cute and slightly ghoulish ghost story set in a local bookstore which is haunted by a deceased customer, an annoying white woman who was a rude imposter of Native American heritage.

Published in 2021, the story is quickly outrun by the historical context: The supernatural apparitions are now parallel to a weird airborne virus that shuts down public life; George Floyd is murdered, and protests of the Black Life Matters movement engulf Minneapolis.

The book becomes witness to the emotional effects of 2020 events… show more.

Louise Erdrich’s most recent novel continues the trend of her recent work of venturing into different kinds of novels. In recent years, she has published dystopian fiction and fiction hueing closely to her family’s personal history.

The Sentence is set in Erdrich’s Minneapolis-based bookstore, Birchbark Books, during the pandemic and George Floyd protests, and, though clearly fiction, it has the feel of a first-person dispatch from our recent tumultuous times.

It is also a ghost story, and it brings together Erdrich’s trademark insightful characterization with a willingness to consider the world as a mysterious place that is sometimes dangerous, sometimes… show more.

Could there be more star-crossed lovers? Pollux must arrest Tookie after she's tricked into driving a man's body over state lines, inadvertently transporting drugs as well. 

After she serves her time, they connect through kindness and care, and marry. She works in a bookstore, haunted by annoying customer Flora. Tookie's convinced that Flora was killed by a powerful sentence in the last book she'd read. The word "sentence" becomes a clever device, connoting Tookie's incarceration, as well as being implicated in Flora's demise.
There are many layers to The Sentence, with themes of indigenous people, marital love, mothers who are… show more.

Louise Erdrich, herself, epitomizes what I love most about reading her stories.

She inspires resilience and change in facing adversity, and does so with humor, laser beam intelligence, and a depth of understanding humanity that is breathtaking, all the while bringing together disparate ideas with the ease of a magician.

As an avid reader of her writings about Native American life, I usually consider her most recent fiction to be my favorite, which is how I feel about The Sentence. Erdrich highlights the non-fictional horrors of 2019-2020 with the COVID pandemic, George Floyd murder, and violent protests.

Her fabulously imagined… show more.