Hardcover, 416 pages
Published Oct. 11, 2021 by Harper.
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.
This was a great little book, packed full of love for books and bookstores and authors (of course) but also full of angst about incarceration and love and anger about indigenous history and what it means when we lose our connections to community and fail to accept the full circles of who we are. Comes with handy book lists in the back!
I ended up loving this book. I didn't quite buy the setup at the beginning; some aspects of the initial incident didn't make sense to me. That distracted and bothered me a little bit for a while, but I was still enjoying it. It started to feel like a collection of interesting short stories. But then at about 100 pages in, everything started to click. It got more exciting, and I got seriously drawn into Tookie's perspective and the overall story. It was educational for me on many levels (Indigenous history, incarceration, Minneapolis, etc.) and gave me a lot to think about, especially concerning the ways in which people are haunted. I really appreciated how it chronicled pandemic life in 2020, as well as George Floyd's murder and the aftermath.
