Book Review: The Sentence

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

The logline got me to put this book on my wishlist: bookseller is haunted by a ghost. I expected maybe something cute and a little bit spooky, like a cozy mystery with supernatural elements. But this book is much deeper than that. I hadn’t realized it dealt so much with Native American culture, or the pandemic, or how much literature swayed the lives of the main characters. They’re all mad for books. They build relationships with each other, and with their customers, based around their love of literature.

The book opens with the event that ends up landing Tookie in prison. (I got this as an audiobook so I’m going to guess on the name spellings). But, while being incarcerated does shape her, it doesn’t really define her. Even being haunted (the principle thread of the book) doesn’t really define her. It’s not a haunted-bookstore novel. It’s a novel, and there’s a haunted bookstore in it. Tookie has to deal with the ghost the way she navigates her other fraught relationships in her life, like with her husband’s niece Hettie, or with her coworker Adema. Tookie doesn’t always succeed; you get the impression that she hasn’t had a lot of great role models in her life. She makes shortsighted decisions on impulse sometimes, like trying to destroy a book because it has a sentence she doesn’t like or agreeing to transport a body for an aggrieved friend.

This is a very nuanced, character-based novel that delicately handles a lot of complex emotionally-laden subjects. Like when Hettie is protesting the murder of George Floyd, despite her fear of Covid, and it causes tension between her and her father, who used to be a cop. Or Tookie’s dislike of Flora and Flora’s desire to associate herself with Native Americans, mixed with Tookie’s grudging assessment that Flora was a pretty good person. There’s also a complicated relationship with food. There’s food you hate but eat grudgingly the way you accept an intolerable situation (boiled rutabagas) and food you desire and get passionate about (wild rice), and the way Pollux uses food as a peace offering.

I’m glad I read this book. It deals with hard subjects, but there’s enough softness there that it goes down easier. It reminded me of the omnipresent fear and turmoil of the pandemic, which I’d surprisingly forgotten. (Had I really washed my groceries with bleach water? It seems like a bad dream.) It also did what the very best literature does, let me into a window on the lives of people who are relatable, yet very different from me.




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