The Sentence (2021)

I’ve only read one other book by Louise Erdrich, in college. At the time, I think I was so overloaded that I couldn’t fully take in Love Medicine, but The Sentence has me wanting to revisit it. This book was profound, unsettling, funny, and deeply loving.

Tookie works at an Indigenous-owned bookstore in Minneapolis, and when her most irritating customer dies on All Saint’s Day, Tookie is convinced that her ghost is still haunting the shop. Over the course of a tumultuous year, she tries to figure out how to put Flora to rest so her ghost will leave her alone.

I’m coming to this review late, but even though it’s been a while since I read the book, I still have a lot of vivid memories from it. It stretches in a lot of different directions, exploring Tookie’s past and present, chapters from Native history, forays into folklore, the individual idiosyncrasies of book lovers, and the real-world upheaval of 2020—especially in Minneapolis! It might not seem like the story of a white-woman ghost and the legend of the rugaroo would fit alongside police brutality protests and trying to adapt to living through a pandemic, and where do Tookie’s curated book lists fit in? But they do. The story flows down a lot of different paths, and they don’t all make sense together in the moment, but as you turn and look back, you can see how the paths intersect.

It's a beautiful novel exploring Indigenous lives in an urban setting. Each of the Native characters is well-drawn and specific, with certain universal experiences knitting together their personal quirks and preferences. We look at Native solidarity with Black communities, especially where policing is concerned. We identify with nature and get into Indigenous practices and traditions. We examine the appropriation and exoticization that creates a sense of white ownership over Indigenous culture, extending as far as desecrating remains.

As our narrator, we get the best look into Tookie, who’s prickly and inventive and reads like it sustains her (because it often has.) She’s screwed up plenty of times in her life, and she’s been discounted by some people and given gracious opportunities by others. She loves hard, even if she doesn’t always know how to show it, and she’s trying to make sense of a world that feels like it’s collapsing in on itself. I love following her perspective as she takes us down the winding paths of the story.

This is a book that can be hard to describe, because it does so many different things at once, and while they all come together in a really satisfying way, they do so in a manner that’s tricky to predict. If you haven’t read the book, you might look at this review and go, “Huh?” Just know that I highly recommend it. The Sentence really rewards your attention and willingness to go where it takes you. The journey won’t be where you expect, but it’s definitely worth it.