Below is the latest Book Stew Review from Eileen MacDougall, host of the long-running Book Stew, a video and podcast devoted to writing in all forms, authors, playwrights, and even a cat who survived a tornado and wrote a book about it.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
This is a dense, multi-layered tour de force, as is Tookie, the narrator and (literally) haunted protagonist. She’s a convicted felon, now happily married to Pollux, the tribal policeman who arrested her. She works at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, a real business owned by Louise Erdrich, the real author (meta alert but it all works beautifully.)
Tookie is undone by the return of stepdaughter Hetta and her newborn son Jarvis, and by her haunting by a deceased bookstore customer, Flora.
All is well as the novel begins in 2019, until Flora dies, George Floyd is murdered, and the pandemic takes hold.
The characters, mostly of various tribal origins, range from demanding customers to the young booksellers to the so-called “friends” who set Tookie up and testi-lied to send her to prison for 10 years.
I felt like there was nothing missing here and everything had a reason, even the haunting of Tookie, and I am not a believer in spirits or ghosts. Quirky elements such as cowbirds (books written by unpublished authors and slipped into the store shelves), rugaroos (werewolves), and the Haskell Indian Nationals University (a Historically Indigenous university which began as a government boarding school) all provide additional enrichment to this story.
This is a remarkable novel which will stay with me forever, my first COVID book, and it’s hard to imagine a better one.
QUOTE: “What we’re living through is either unreal or too real, I can’t decide.”
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