The Sentence

Simply too long

Stand in for “the mighty red” which hasn’t been added. Found the main character frustratingly passive.

I cried for fifteen minutes after I finished. I was feeling sad before I got to the end, but the amount of good that Tookie ended up experiencing made me feel alright. As if everything was going to work out because it did for Tookie.

It’s still jarring to read about the pandemic in new books, but this is a really wonderful story.

It's a haunting tale, a heartfelt ode to the written word, a deep dive into Indigenous identity, and a timely response to a turbulent and world-altering environment. Simultaneously brutally realistic and wonderfully metafictional, it seethes with a profound sense of morality, brims with humor, and enthralls with its powerful and irresistible narrative voice. Erdrich's most poignant ethical message in this work revolves around people's potential for transformation, their capacity to surpass the limitations of the phrases they encounter, and their ability to utilize the sentences they read and speak as gateways to a richer life and a path to freedom. "The Sentence" is truly extraordinary, and Erdrich is a masterful storyteller of remarkable tales.

Lovely, lovely book. I bought this book for my dad since Erdrich is one of his favorite authors, and I’m glad I made myself read it before giving it away.

I read La Rose a few years ago and I was really affected by the way the book addressed the Native American genocide and its repression in the American consciousness. This novel has similar themes and deals with the overlapping repression of the Covid pandemic, which at the time I’m reading this continues to kill thousands every month. I really highly recommend you give this a read!

What an unexpected book. If I had known how heavily the pandemic and the George Floyd protests would figure into the story, I don't think I would have picked it up. (Life has been so tragic these last several years and I'm still in the thick of it.) But I'm glad I did. It's somehow heartwarming and hopeful not just in spite of our challenges, but because of them. It's beautiful and real and it may be just what I needed.

This book was vastly different to what I expected. Another book selling itself as funny that’s really not, this was in fact quite serious and hard hitting. The writing style was beautiful, woven with so many truly stunning prose.

I didn’t get a fun and entertaining ghost story from this novel, but I did get a novel about identity, family and main character discovering herself.

A small, independent bookstore in Minneapolis becomes a community center for readers and a haven for Tookie, who has a traumatic past. Having served 10 years, finally her wrongful conviction is reversed and she is let out of prison. Tookie gets a job and finds peace recommending just the right book for each reader who asks. At the opening of this book, the store's most annoying employee has died and starts haunting the store. Flora visits Tookie inparticular. But why? This is thematically rich and emotionally intense. The second half of the novel deals with living through the COVID pandemic and the events and aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The author balances emotionally harrowing content with moments of warmth and humor. There is found family and community around the bookshop. The prose is powerful and evocative. The importance of stories and books and love of literature is a constant throughline. This is a snapshot of a moment in time for America and what we lived through and have to grapple with from our history and our justice system. It does not offer any prescriptions or answers. There are no shining heroes. Just people and communities trying to live their lives and what it means to be a family or a community together.

Lost me very much in the rehashing of COVID. I don’t mind something taking place during COVID but I’m not interested in reliving the more emotionally fraught moments of COVID. Too soon. It’s beautifully wrought like most Erdrich but it just wasn’t for me.

Another book outside my usual SFF genre! And another good one. A well-written story about family and friends and a bookshop before the pandemic, and during the pandemic. Oh, and the bookstore is haunted by a former customer. But while the haunting is important to the story, what's more important is the way the book looks at identity. Knowing who you really are is important, in good ways and bad ways. A lot of the novel revolves around the experiences of indigenous people in the middle of white society. When George Floyd's death happens, the native people grieve and protest in solidarity with everyone else. It was really interesting to see how a community reacted to an event like Floyd's death that happened in their town. Bonus: Tookie, the main character, works in a bookstore and has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of books. The back of the book contains a list of the books she recommends. A good book. Thumbs up.

My review for The Night Watchman by Erdrich said that it was a love letter written as fiction. A love letter to her people, especially her grandfather. This book is also a love letter, still to her people, but also to books, bookstores, and the power of story. Tookie spent 10 years in prison for a mistake made when she was young and under the influence. After prison, she begins to work in a bookstore, gets married, and is having a normal life, one she is grateful for. Until her least favorite customer dies and begins to haunt the bookstore. The story's setting is November 2019-2020. The haunting occurs during a time of isolation, fear, pandemic, the murder of George Floyd. The overall theme for me is the question, "What do we owe the dead?" I loved Tookie and her co-workers and family members. I laughed at one moment and was near tears the next. That's the genius of Erdrich as a writer. This book will stay with me.

This book feels meandering at first, but it quickly becomes deceptively layered and intersectional—often in surprising ways. It touches on disproportionate victimization of marginalized people on issues people ought to have heard of, such as representation in incarceration versus population and common misconceptions, micro aggressions and outright racism; as well as other systemic issues, such as the mass, violent Displacement of indigenous people resulting in generations of indigenous people disconnected from their people and land because of “reeducation” and entering foster systems. Tookie works at a bookstore after serving a long sentence. She has a relationship with the tribal officer who arrested her. She consumes indigenous stories through the lens of colonial authors because own voice authors are few and far between. The most frequent customer at the shop comes to represent a lot of complex issues with regards to displacement and identity with indigenous peoples, and when she dies, actually becomes a ghost that replicates colonial behaviour at a personal level on Tookie. In some ways the story is very strange. It’s very concerned with a lot of particular books, generally well regarded novels in western lit. The plot doesn’t really drop a hook until just short of Halfway into the book. It establishes a lot about Tookie and intersectional identity in all the characters up to that point and it does, I think, manage to weave it altogether. For a story about being haunted and dogged by generational issues that continue to intrude into the present, it initially feels like it has little stakes, but the pay off is quite good if you can latch onto and enjoy the overall voice and odd sort of curiosity it cultivates. I liked that it dodged western perspectives in its structure and the main narrative tension, and I simply haven’t seen these themes interrogated quite like this, so I quite liked it. It’s my first book by Erdrich and it made me excited to read more from her.

A timely novel about the importance of connecting and loving others, and of reading good books (lists included) set in a tribal community that is also part of the larger community - protesting the death of George Floyd and dealing with the first year of COVID from an “essential business” (the bookstore). Oh and prison and ghosts and various traditions of cleansing impurities (think sage smudge not ingesting bleach). And newborn babies and forgiveness. It feels like the book started in a very different direction but then COVID happened. We are all the richer for this narrative in the very capable hands of the author.

So beautiful. So... haunting. Sorry. This is a lovely book about a Native woman who grapples with her past during 2020 in Minneapolis. It starts out feeling pleasantly slow-paced and meandering, but every scene helps illustrate or build to something important. Also, our heroine works at a bookstore, has an intimate relationship with the written word, and there is a ghost. I had to stop twice to copy sentences and passages into my journal, which is not a thing I do. But it was that beautiful.