Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence highlights the power of words. As it is set in a bookstore and the author herself owns Birchbark Books, I anticipated a richly detailed sense of place and community as well as a clear love of books. The Sentence delivers those things along with a complex look at what it means to be haunted.
(Content warnings for the book and this review: incarceration, anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism, police brutality, COVID-19, and grief, as well as brief instances of attempted self-harm/suicide and brief discussions of a past overdose.)
After Tookie stole a dead body for her then-crush without realizing she was smuggling drugs, she spent the better part of a decade in jail. She now works at an independent bookstore, healing from her past through her love of books as well as her relationship with her husband. When an aggravating customer dies and begins haunting Tookie, she investigates the patron’s mysterious death, all while experiencing conflict within her household and reckoning with the broader events of 2020.
Tookie and the ghost, Flora, have a complicated relationship. As the book discusses outright, the haunting is a subversion of the problematic “Indian burial ground” trope. Flora, a white woman, based her life around cultural appropriation, and even in death she is trying to claim a place and person which are not hers. Meanwhile, Tookie can’t help but wonder if the dead’s refusal to leave her alone is retribution for her past body snatching.
The paranormal elements aren’t the only source of horror in this book. It takes place in 2020 in Minneapolis, and the second half depicts COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd. The latter hits home for Tookie; not only are Indigenous people also victims of police brutality, with she herself having faced abuse in jail, but her husband—who is also Indigenous—is an ex-cop. One of the book’s most successful through lines to me is how it parallels Tookie’s literal haunting, as well as the other ghost stories that crop up around her, with the way she and her community are figuratively haunted by trauma and injustice.
There is also a running thread of isolation, a theme I’m personally drawn to. Tookie already experienced intense isolation in prison, and now she’s being haunted by a ghost she can’t prove exists, isolating her from those she’s since connected with. Of course, the pandemic heightens all of this. Even books themselves, though highlighted as a way for people to connect, are brought up as potentially isolating.
For all of the story’s heavy topics, the fact that Tookie takes nothing for granted lends a warmth to the moments in which she appreciates everything she has, even when her hard-won stability is continually threatened. Throughout the story, she banters with her husband and coworkers, and she bonds with customers over a passion for books. Settings and characters are lovingly, sometimes wistfully, observed. Still, Tookie periodically spirals into a dark, surreal headspace, and as a lover of messy female characters who alternate between digging themselves into holes and clawing their way out, I enjoyed following her journey. I found this story’s balance effective for covering a whole year of someone’s life, with the ups and downs, major events, and small moments that entails.
As for the sapphic representation in this book, Tookie’s ill-fated crush on a female friend is the catalyst for her backstory, and an important side character is also revealed to be sapphic. While I don’t think any of this needed major focus, I do feel like it was a missed opportunity to not incorporate at least a little more about Tookie’s feelings for women. Even if it is not an important part of her life, that fact itself could have been touched on. The book covers many themes that are common in queer narratives—including identity, discrimination, isolation, unconventional family dynamics, community, and grief—so expanding on that aspect could have added another dimension.
I recommend this book to people looking for literary fiction with a speculative twist, particularly if you want to read a cathartic story featuring recent events.
