"Through the lens of its unforgettable Native American protagonist, this brilliant bookstore-set ghost story provides a dazzling commentary on these unsettling days."
Pulitzer Prize-winning Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence is an utterly absorbing, utterly unique novel that takes in potent issues of our time - Covid, BLM, the suppression and erasure of indigenous cultures - with astounding invention, black humour and humanity. It really is kaleidoscopic, with “The Sentence” of the title having many meanings. Firstly, its main character, Tookie, has served time in jail for her part in getting rid of a body. The motif remerges when Tookie (you can’t help but love this complex, flawed, one-of-a-kind character) later finds herself sentenced to being haunted by a former customer of the Minneapolis bookshop she works in. And then there are sentences formed from words, for this novel is also an affecting tribute to the power of books.
Post-incarceration, Tookie has found love and marriage with the former tribal police officer who arrested her, a loving man who’s renowned for his knowledge of tribal traditions and practices. Right after one of her regular customers dies while reading a manuscript she stole from the bookstore, Tookie feels a strange presence that soon escalates from being annoying to putting her in danger. At the same time, the pandemic is escalating too, and protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
While researching the mysterious manuscript, and amidst all this uncertainty and very real danger, Tookie comes to profoundly moving realisations about her past, about her loved ones, and about the history and experience of her people: “We’ve endured centuries of being erased and sentenced to live in a replacement culture. So even someone raised strictly in their own tradition gets pulled toward white perspectives”. Bold, complex, funny and moving, this is a richly rewarding, enlightening novel.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
.jpg)
