Hardcover, 416 pages
Published Oct. 11, 2021 by Harper.
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.
I tried. The story of unjust incarceration in the beginning was fascinating. Then, everything fell absolutely flat. I tried to understand any of the characters, but they all kind of bled together over weird scattered diversions and the story went nowhere. Gave up 25% in. I wanted to love this -- the premise sounds great! -- but couldn't find anything to grasp.
This was a great little book, packed full of love for books and bookstores and authors (of course) but also full of angst about incarceration and love and anger about indigenous history and what it means when we lose our connections to community and fail to accept the full circles of who we are. Comes with handy book lists in the back!
When written well, an annoying character doesn't have to be annoying (I'm looking at you Holden.). In the beginning of the novel and by her own admission, Tookie is a 'bad' person. But I still hoped for her. Then her life settles and she's funny and angry and scared and sad. I was with her the whole way.
A beautiful book.
I've enjoyed other books by Louise Erdrich but I wouldn't have guessed this one was written by her. It felt a bit all over the place, and I found myself wondering if I was listening to it on "shuffle" because while I had a sense of what was going on, it didn't feel super cohesive to me, nor did I find myself caring about the characters. Where it started and where it ended felt like two different books, but I did appreciate that she wove covid into it in a way that took me back to 2020.
I might have been a distracted listener, but this one felt like it had a bit of an identity crisis to me.
Years from now, when people ask me what it was like to live through 2020, this is the book I’ll point them to. I wasn’t sure what to make of the book for the first third or so. It’s disjointed. It felt like the story, about a haunting at a bookstore, was getting interrupted by a few too many musings on various experiences. At times it reads more as an excuse to review other books than to write a new one. Then the story is further interrupted by the beginning of the pandemic and the unrest of the summer of protests in reaction to police violence, much as they did our lives last year, and, I’m assuming, Erdrich’s writing process . By the end of the story, all of it, even these social upheavals, are scooped up nicely into a story that is interested in what it means to be …
Years from now, when people ask me what it was like to live through 2020, this is the book I’ll point them to. I wasn’t sure what to make of the book for the first third or so. It’s disjointed. It felt like the story, about a haunting at a bookstore, was getting interrupted by a few too many musings on various experiences. At times it reads more as an excuse to review other books than to write a new one. Then the story is further interrupted by the beginning of the pandemic and the unrest of the summer of protests in reaction to police violence, much as they did our lives last year, and, I’m assuming, Erdrich’s writing process . By the end of the story, all of it, even these social upheavals, are scooped up nicely into a story that is interested in what it means to be haunted - in more ways than one - by past, present, and future. I don’t think it’s her strongest book but it was a welcome opportunity to reflect on the past year.
This was lovely.
So. Unbearably. SLOW.
It took me almost two weeks to read; I found it nearly impossible to go more than two pages without stopping dumbly, having to reread a particular sentence or passage, savor it, sometimes to the point of putting the book down. Then, when the end approached, I had to read even slower because dammit I could not bear the thought of ending our relationship. Sometimes Jackie resented a perfectly good book because it ‘forced’ her to stay up all night. Oh, how I resent this book. For forcing me to read so slowly. For ending. For making me fall head-over-heels in love with every one of the beautiful imperfect characters and especially with the writer who gave them life and who so exquisitely put together word after perfect word.
