Book: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich
audiobook published by HarperAudio
2021

This audiobook, read by the author, gets off to a rough start: people in bad situations are making bad decisions, and the wrongness of it all started to dissuade me from sticking with it… but the story turns!

After Tookie’s bad decisions lead to a long prison sentence, books help her survive incarceration, and lead her to seek a job at an indigenous bookstore in Minneapolis.

Her passion for books makes her an effective bookseller, and her love for a former tribal policeman gives her a warm home life. However, the survival of the bookshop – and everyone she cares about in and outside of it – is in doubt when the COVID pandemic hits.

An eventful year unfolds. Tookie meets her unexpected grandchild-in-law, a white customer dies and haunts the store (!) creating cultural difficulties in her discussions with her husband about ghosts and fear the customer was killed by something she read (!), she experiences the routine annoyance of white people badgering her and her colleagues with their we-were-the-good-guys family mythologies about indigenous people, and George Floyd is murdered nearby. The protests, and the solidarity from the Indigenous experience with police, made this year-in-the-life tale feel completely current.

Erdrich, who is Chippewa herself, spins a heartfelt story of a difficult year of an indigenous person with a criminal record trying to hold her life together. Tookie has had a gritty upbringing and has developed unusual expertise in saying the wrong thing, but her actions are always infused with caring, good intentions, and books.

Erdrich’s love of books comes through very clearly in the writing, and this is one of those fiction books that comes with its own recommended reading list! (I am pretending that I will someday get to the books on the list!). It also includes friendly-but-serious bickering between characters about wild rice preferences.

This book is an unconventional narrative that portrays one imperfect woman’s experiences of recent global and US events, the ongoing challenges of being a previously incarcerated person, the aggravations of midwestern racism, and getting along with in-laws, plus abundant and heartfelt book-love. The book’s title will shift in meaning as you read it.