The Sentence

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The Sentence veers pretty wildly between emotional tones. Tookie’s theft of Budgie’s body is very madcap and fun, and then her early days at the bookstore are settled and restrained and slice-of-life-esque. By the time Erdrich gets into the pandemic and the protests over George Floyd’s murder, she’s writing something close to narrative nonfiction. For me, the shifting tones work because of the lightness of Erdrich’s touch. What did you think? But Tookie recommends a ton of books in the novel, and Erdrich herself included a list in the appendix. So we have culled three of our favorite reads from that list of books and authors. And Erdrich not only lives there, but also owns a bookstore very similar to the shop in The Sentence. Birchbark Books describes itself as “a locus for Indigirati – literate Indigenous people who have survived over half a millennium on this continent”. And so it is with its fictional counterpart. Tookie looks over shelves filled with Indigenous history, fiction, memoir and poetry and “realised we are more brilliant than I knew”. One of their customers is Flora, a white woman who claims Native heritage. Tookie calls her “a very persistent wannabe”: a stalker of all things Indigenous. But when Flora dies suddenly, on 2 November, All Souls’ Day, “when the fabric between the worlds is thin as tissue and easily torn”, her ghost refuses to leave the bookshop. Her spirit haunts Tookie and her co-workers – and the mystery of her spirit presence is one of the motors that drives the book, as Tookie seeks to discover what keeps her drifting among the shelves. Tookie does her best, which is normally pretty good, but she does manage to put her foot in it every now and then; as she notes: "doing the wrong thing in general was my nature".

The haunting in Tookie’s life becomes literal in the personage of Flora, who when living was one of Tookie’s most annoying bookstore customers. Tookie refers to Flora as a “stalker — of all things Indigenous,” or else as a “very persistent wannabe.” She’s a white woman who’s fixated on Native culture, claiming variously to have been an Indian in a previous life or to have had Indigenous heritage that her family hushed up. Annoyingly, Flora also does a lot of good things for Minneapolis’s Native community — fundraisers, volunteer work, fostering Native teen runaways — so Tookie feels compelled not to call her out on her overreach. World Fantasy Convention (2010). "Award Winners and Nominees". Archived from the original on December 1, 2010 . Retrieved February 4, 2011. Erdrich anchors her story through the character of Tookie. Tookie proudly wears her Ojibwe identity. But her complicated past will continue to throw shadows upon her. She was arrested for a crime in which she lost all good sense. Prison taught her many skills and honed in her ability to see well beyond the obvious. Her diligence got her a job in a small business bookstore and the lasting imprint of her personality roped in a husband, Pollux, a former police officer. Their relationship was destined in the stars. Tookie's struggles with her ghost are very much on her mind -- but so is a great deal else; The Sentence is a fairly busy book. I do like books about bookstores as I have worked in independent bookstores for many, many years. I enjoyed the parts of the book that took place during the “haunting” and how it was dealt with. Flora, one of their most persistent and at times annoying customers, dies on All Souls Day but her ghost refuses to leave the store. It is enough to unsettle Tookie and she tries all manner of ways to deal with it.

Sentence , a word of multiple meanings - the sentence that the main character, an ex con named Tookie serves in jail, the sentences in this book and the so many other books mentioned here, (thankfully Erdrich gave us a list at the end), the sentences the characters sometimes impose on themselves . a b "Louise Erdrich: About the Author: HarperCollins Publishers". Harpercollins.com. March 24, 2010 . Retrieved October 23, 2013. The Sentence: It's such an unassuming title (and one that sounds like it belongs to a writing manual); but, Louise Erdrich's latest is a deceptively big novel, various in its storytelling styles; ambitious in its immediacy. It becomes a challenge, figuring out how to cope with this unwanted visitor. Why was she there, in the bookstore in particular, and what would it take to get her to leave? Flora had been found with an open book, a very old journal, The Sentence: An Indian Captivity 1862-1883. The book seems to be implicated in Flora’s passing. Tookie tries to figure out if the book had a role to play in Flora’s death. There might be a perilous sentence in the book.

The sincere and somewhat gruff Tookie is a fine guide, and her turbulent life -- and the genuine affection (despite the occasional frustrations) she has for those around her -- make her a fine main figure. A rather unusual story that is multi-layered, haunting, and perceptive and combines a lighthearted ghost story with a woman rebuilding her life after being freed from prison. Then add a heavy dose of Covid reality and a shifting political world, and you have the makings of an excellent story that embraces literature, the meaning of words, and the healing power of books. Half way into the book, Erdrich gets to COVID and the subsequent BLM protests which gutted Minneapolis. Could the book have been just as effective if not set against these convulsive events?When I found out about the prize I was living on a farm in New Hampshire near the college I'd attended," Erdrich told an interviewer. "I was nearly broke and driving a car with bald tires. My mother knitted my sweaters, and all else I bought at thrift stores ... The recognition dazzled me. Later, I became friends with Studs Terkel and Kay Boyle, the judges, toward whom I carry a lifelong gratitude. This prize made an immense difference in my life." [27] Flora is a contradiction. She was a good customer, but also stole the book. She means well, dropping off potpourri, but then she’s also a clumsy appropriator of culture. She shops at the store, but later haunts it. Do you believe in ghosts? What was Flora’s role in the story? Overall, The Sentence didn’t work for me – with an unrelatable main character and jumbled writing style. Thank you to NetGalley & Little Brown Books UK – Corsaire for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for a (very) honest review.

It’s also Erdrich all the way down. In a paper published 30 years ago, the scholar Catherine Rainwater observed that Erdrich’s books are filled with “extreme cases of code conflict.” These include the rifts between industrial and ceremonial time; Christian theology and shamanic religion; the nuclear family and tribal kinship structures. “The Sentence” finds its protagonist squeezed into a space like that between the rough and soft sides of a Velcro closure. Tookie can’t square her husband’s affiliations — he’s a former tribal policeman — with her own experiences of state-inflicted violence; nor can she reconcile her sense of physical strength with her mental permeability. On top of being a creative clever ghost-style-examination of 2019 and 2020, it’s also an impressive This book was marketed as a ghost story set in a bookshop, which for a book-blogger and bibliophile sounds like a brilliant premise. However, the ghost story isn’t atmospheric or interesting and also takes a side-line to politics and the covid pandemic which seemed a bit of a shame. At 50% I still had no idea where the book was going and realised that I didn’t really care either way – I wasn’t gripped or hooked with the plot to want to find out more.The Sentence is definitely character driven. We will meet Pollux' complicated daughter as well as Tookie's fellow workers at the store. And with every opportunity around every corner, Erdrich will insert matters for the mind. As other readers of this novel will tell you, early 2020 with the pandemic in full force and the riots after the murder of George Floyd will leave a bitter ache. Walking through the streets of these events, especially with the pandemic still in our midst, is going to be heavy and heartbreaking. But it's all part of Tookie's existence at the time as well.

Dartmouth 2009 Honorary Degree Recipient Louise Erdrich '76 (Doctor of Letters)". Dartmouth.edu. June 7, 2010. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014 . Retrieved October 23, 2013. These questions have been tailored to this book’s specific reading experience, but if you want more ideas, we also have an article with 101 generic book club questions. Mercifully released after 10 years, Tookie, who's Native American, lands a job at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis — the very same independent bookstore that Louise Erdrich owns in real life. Erdrich herself makes sporadic appearances here, but she's by no means the most jarring presence in the bookstore, as Tookie ominously tells us: "In November 2019, death took one of my most annoying customers. But she did not disappear." The pair's literary partnership led them to a romantic relationship. They married in 1981, and raised three children whom Dorris had adopted as a single parent (Reynold Abel, Madeline, and Sava [11]) and three biological children together (Persia, Pallas, and Aza Marion [16]). Reynold Abel suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and in 1991, at age 23, he was killed when he was hit by a car. [17] In 1995, their son Sava accused Dorris of committing child abuse; [18] in 1997, after Dorris' death, his adopted daughter Madeline claimed that Dorris had sexually abused her and Erdrich had neglected to stop the abuse. [19] Talk about the “Indian wannabes”, as Tookie calls them. You know, the “I was Indian in a former life” or “my grandma was an Indian” tropes. Like that woman in blue who wanted to share stories of her grand whoever who helped the starving Indians (but wasn’t willing to give up the land to them)…the same woman then who later dropped off the bones.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape”. I tried with The Sentence, I really did, but I got to this paragraph at 50% into the book and it just reiterated the fact that it was doing none of those things for me. I’m sad to say it was my first DNF of 2022. Oprah Daily's Books Director, Leigh Haber, interviewed the beloved author about her latest novel, which is set in a bookstore not unlike the one Erdrich herself owns...except for the ghosts, of course.