Name: Catherine Nicolai's review of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Item: The Sentence
Rating: 4
Author: Catherine Nicolai

Louise Erdrich

In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors. 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. The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

Pulitzer Prize Winning author of The Night Watchman

The Sentence

Catherine Nicolai

In this powerful and timely novel, National Book Award winning author Louise Erdrich explores how the burdens of history, and especially identity, appropriation, exploitation, and violence done to human beings in the name of justice, manifest in ordinary lives today. Revolving around a small independent bookstore in contemporary Minneapolis, The Sentence follows a turbulent year in the life of a strong though vulnerable Ojibwe woman named Tookie. After serving part of an outrageously long sentence, Tookie, who "learned to read with murderous attention" while in prison, naturally gravitates toward working at a bookstore. There she joins a dedicated community of artists and book lovers and begins to build a new life for herself. When Flora, the store's most persistent customer, suddenly dies, her ghost refuses to leave. Flora returns on All Soul's Day to haunt the bookstore and in particular, Tookie. Why? The mystery of this revenant's appearance leads Asema, a fellow Ojibwe bookseller, and Tookie to a shocking personal discovery with historical reverberations. Tookie finds that this year of disease, violence, and political upheaval is, on a worldwide scale, a year of ghosts and hauntings. A complicated love finds Tookie as well when Pollux, who has been in love with her for years, proposes, and they marry. Pollux was the tribal police officer who arrested Tookie all those years ago for a crime which turned out to be more serious than Tookie knew. How Pollux and Tookie overcome past betrayal and learn to trust each other is a challenge that will either deepen or destroy their love. The Sentence begins on All Soul's Day 2019 and ends on All Soul's Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

Regan Martin

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

Sarah Erle

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. 

Evan Carter

Patrick Book

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

Ama Aljuffry

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!

Alex 

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!

Lara Engle

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. 

Beth Bartholomew

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.

Cheryl Hedlund

In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors. 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. The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

Sarai Johnson

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.

Janice Hopper

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.

Cheri McElroy

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.

Fraser Simons

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.

Cindy Lieberman

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.

Stephanie Cox

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.

Naomi P

For a book that was supposedly about to be THE sentence, there was little of it in the book.

The more I read the book, the more detached I was from it. The premise was really interesting -- a bookseller is haunted by a ghost who died after reading a sentence from a book -- and I was expecting that the story would revolve around uncovering what that sentence is and how it ties to the life of the main character. I could only recount 3 significant instances where the main character, Tookie, interacted with the ghost.

Most (if not all) of the events in the book were dropped like bombs. Suddenly, Tookie was Native American. Suddenly, there was the BLM movement because of the George Floyd protests. Suddenly, COVID happened. It felt like the book targeted a niche market and the reader should have a general idea of those three things before diving in. The events were was so disconnected from each other because I don't know how those three things tied in with the ghost story and the bookstore that the ghost was haunting.

I was initially delighted to see that the book touched on Native American culture. It was a great opportunity for the book to help readers understand the Native American culture and what their views are about ghosts, hauntings, and probably covid and the BLM movement. But there was none. I don't know what burning sage meant, how surnames are significant to them, or how Native Americans are treated in America.

I was also hoping for more scenes in the bookstore and how books tied in with Tookie's life. At the end of the book, Tookie gave a list of recommended books and I wished it was weaved in with the events of her life. She was well-read, based on the list, but I did not see that in the book. The only mention of books as a place of solace was at the start of the book.

The relationships between the characters also felt detached for me. It probably lacked descriptions of emotions. I didn't feel the love between Tookie and her husband, only until [spoiler] he contacted the virus and was placed in the ICU. That's when I felt the fear of losing him. Even then, I still felt that it was lacking. I was hoping that with that experience, she would cry out to the ghost or turn to books.

Maybe the book is not for me. While reading it, I was thinking of how it could be improved and make it more about the ghost -- because that was what the premise promised.

Catherine Nicolai &
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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Catherine Nicolai &The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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Catherine Nicolai &
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