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Loading... The Sentence (2021)by Louise Erdrich
   » 14 more Top Five Books of 2021 (180) Books Read in 2023 (364) Books Read in 2021 (793) Books Read in 2022 (3,438) FAB 2022 (7) READ IN 2022 (76) Netgalley Reads (189) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) diveteamzissou | May 10, 2024 |  The story takes place over a year, beginning in Minneapolis on All Souls Day in November 2019 and finishing in 2020. The main character Tookie is an Ojibwe woman who works in a bookstore. Her love for books and literature began while imprisoned for stealing and transporting a dead body over state lines for a grieving friend. During her prison sentence she is given a dictionary and becomes an avid reader, a love that permeates each part of the book. One of Tookie’s regular customers, Flora, dies on All Souls Day and refuses to leave the bookstore, her ghost persistently haunting Tookie. During the year that follows Tookie must work out how to put Flora’s ghost to rest, along with balancing her relationship with her partner Pollux and his niece Hetta, and negotiating the traumas of the COVID pandemic and the rioting and mayhem following the murder of George Floyd and the BlackLivesMatter protests. I struggled to get on with the first part of this book as it made a rather dramatic shift in tone and genre from a mad dash and humorous adventure with Tookie stealing the body, to a much slower paced more reflective story as the ghost tale unfolds. I’m also not a huge fan of ghost stories, but the thing that sucks you into this story is the larger than life Tookie herself with her wry humour, cultural wisdom, groundedness, and her love for her family. I loved her relationship with Pollux with their sharing of food expressing their deep feelings and connection, and with their wholehearted supportiveness of each other. The other thing that was difficult as a reader was the nearness of the events. This would probably be easier to read five or ten years later but the Pandemic and events of 2020 still feel very fresh, like some global communal trauma that so many people are still scarred by. Aside from the obvious deaths and illness, there was the impact of the isolation and lock downs, the huge fear and uncertainties projected daily into our lives with constantly changing rules and restrictions, and the suffering people experienced at being unable to visit their sick in hospital or the elderly in nursing homes, attend family funerals or the births of babies. It was like living through a science fiction movie or a huge social experiment, the impacts of which are still not fully understood. I am glad Erdrich has been brave enough to record some of this but 2020 was definitely a hell of a year that many people would love to have woken up from and discovered it was all a bad dream. This was an insightful, interesting read with a lovable main character. ( ) mimbza | May 8, 2024 |  ) Lylee | Apr 7, 2024 | 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. ( ) jepeters333 | Feb 25, 2024 | ) mjphillips | Feb 23, 2024 |
The Sentence covers a lot of ground, from ghosts to the joys and trials of bookselling to the lives of Native Americans and inmates doing hard time. And that’s just the first half of the story, before the pandemic, before George Floyd. The novel gets a little baggy after a while, as Erdrich struggles to juggle multiple plotlines. But the virtues here so outweigh the flaws that to complain seems almost like ingratitude ... The Sentence is rife with passages that stop you cold, particularly when Erdrich...articulates those stray, blindsiding moments that made 2020 not only tragic but also so downright weird and unsettling ... There is something wonderfully comforting in the precise recollection of such furtive memories, like someone quietly opening a door onto a little slice of clarity ... The Sentence testifies repeatedly to the power books possess to heal us and, yes, to change our lives ... There are books, like this one, that while they may not resolve the mysteries of the human heart, go a long way toward shedding light on our predicaments. In the case of The Sentence, that’s plenty. The coronavirus pandemic is still raging away and God knows we’ll be reading novels about it for years, but Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence may be the best one we ever get. Neither a grim rehashing of the lockdown nor an apocalyptic exaggeration of the virus, her book offers the kind of fresh reflection only time can facilitate, and yet it’s so current the ink feels wet ... Such is the mystery of Erdrich’s work, and The Sentence is among her most magical novels, switching tones with the felicity of a mockingbird ... The great arc of [the] first 30 pages — zany body-snatching! harrowing prison ordeal! opposites-attract rom-com! — could have provided all the material needed for a whole novel, but Erdrich has something else in mind for The Sentence: This is a ghost story — though not like any I’ve read before. The novel’s ectoplasm hovers between the realms of historical horror and cultural comedy ... Moving at its own peculiar rhythm with a scope that feels somehow both cloistered and expansive, The Sentence captures a traumatic year in the history of a nation struggling to appreciate its own diversity. 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... All is tumultuous in The Sentence — the spirits, the country, Erdrich's own style. One of the few constants this novel affirms is the power of books. Tookie recalls that everyone at Birchbark is delighted when bookstores are deemed an "essential" business during the pandemic, making books as important as "food, fuel, heat, garbage collection, snow shoveling, and booze." No arguments here. And I'd add The Sentence to the growing list of fiction that seems pretty "essential" for a deeper take on the times we're living through. Clearly having been written in the midst of the events that overtake its characters—the coronavirus and then the Twin Cities' eruption over the murder of George Floyd—the book has a sometimes disconcerting you-are-there quality, which can seem out of step with the story proper, though the events do amplify the novel's themes of social and personal connection and dissociation, and of the historic crimes and contemporary aggressions, micro and overt, perpetrated in the name of white supremacy. What does hold everything together here, fittingly enough in a novel so much of which takes place in a bookstore, is the connection made through reading; and one of the great charms of The Sentence for an avid reader is the running commentary on books—recommendations, judgments, citations, even, at the end, a Totally Biased List of Tookie's favorites. Few novelists can fuse the comic and the tragic as beautifully as Louise Erdrich does, and she does it again in The Sentence ... No one escapes heartache in The Sentence, but mysteries old and new are solved, and some of the broken places made stronger. The Sentence, a book about the healing power of books, makes its own case splendidly. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.08)
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