The Sentence

My first Erdrich. I enjoyed it and will read more. This novel is trying to do a lot of things, and it mostly succeeds! It's about love of books; ghosts; Covid-19; policing; incarceration; and holding onto Indigenous identity in a settler society, all interspersed with plenty of wit to balance out the grim moments.

This was discounted at my local bookstore as a remainder, which makes me suspect sales have dropped off because people don't want to revisit 2020 in a society that has seemed eager these past few years to forget both the racial justice demands of that summer and the lessons about community care from the pandemic. But for that very reason, I appreciated revisiting those events; and the book is also about much more.

Occasionally, the novel's devices for withholding information to create suspense feel too obvious, straining the suspension of disbelief. Overall, a well-told and intricately textured story with many comic moments.

Also: first ever shoutout I've seen in print to my favorite Minneapolis cafe, Hard Times.

It's full of wonderful characters that are clunky and flawed in a real and lovable way. But the story just cannot decide what it wants to be. It ends up an arduous slog of pieces that never come together.

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.