Editors Reads Verdict
A novel that is hard to categorise — part ghost story, part love letter to bookselling, part reckoning with 2020 — but which coheres through Tookie's voice, one of Erdrich's funniest and most immediate narrators.
What We Loved
- Tookie is one of Erdrich's most immediately engaging narrators — funny, warm, and honest about her own contradictions
- The bookshop setting allows Erdrich to embed an enormous amount of literary commentary naturally
- The 2020 material — pandemic, Floyd's murder, the uprising — is handled with documentary immediacy rather than retrospective processing
Minor Drawbacks
- The ghost story mechanics are less interesting than the realist sections
- Less mythologically rich than Erdrich's North Dakota novels — the Minneapolis setting produces a different register
Key Takeaways
- → Bookselling is a form of community — the relationships between booksellers and regular customers are their own kind of attachment
- → Living through an event of the magnitude of 2020 — pandemic and racial uprising simultaneously — requires narrative processing that documentary alone cannot provide
- → Haunting is what happens when something that should be resolved stays open
| Author | Louise Erdrich |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Harper |
| Pages | 400 |
| Published | November 9, 2021 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Ghost Story |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Erdrich readers who want her most recent novel, and book-lovers who want fiction about the experience of working in and loving an independent bookshop. |
The Ghost
Flora is dead. She was, when alive, a regular at Birchbark Books — the real Minneapolis bookshop that Louise Erdrich owns, where this novel is nominally set — and she was the kind of customer who drove the booksellers to distraction: appropriating Native identity, lecturing the Native American staff about Native American culture, returning books after reading them and demanding refunds. Now she is haunting the shop, and specifically haunting Tookie.
Tookie is a Ojibwe woman with a criminal past (she was sentenced for smuggling a body across state lines, which has a story behind it) who has built a good life: a husband, Pollux, whom she loves; a job at the bookshop; a community. The haunting is an inconvenience and then something more.
2020 in Minneapolis
Erdrich began writing The Sentence in early 2020 and was working on it when George Floyd was murdered eight blocks from her bookshop on May 25. She incorporated what she witnessed directly — the uprising, the burning, the grief and rage and solidarity of the Minneapolis summer — and the result is as immediate an account of that specific time and place as fiction has produced.
The pandemic, the murder, the ghost, the bookshop: these elements should not cohere and largely do. What holds them together is Tookie’s voice — practical, funny, loving, clear-eyed about her own history and uncertain about the ghost.
Our rating: 4.1/5 — Erdrich’s most immediate novel: a ghost story, a bookshop novel, and a real-time reckoning with the year Minneapolis burned.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Sentence" about?
Tookie, a Native American woman who works at a Minneapolis independent bookshop (based on Erdrich's own Birchbark Books), is haunted by the ghost of the most annoying customer who ever died. Set during 2020 — the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the uprising that followed in the city where Erdrich lives.
Who should read "The Sentence"?
Erdrich readers who want her most recent novel, and book-lovers who want fiction about the experience of working in and loving an independent bookshop.
What are the key takeaways from "The Sentence"?
Bookselling is a form of community — the relationships between booksellers and regular customers are their own kind of attachment Living through an event of the magnitude of 2020 — pandemic and racial uprising simultaneously — requires narrative processing that documentary alone cannot provide Haunting is what happens when something that should be resolved stays open
Is "The Sentence" worth reading?
A novel that is hard to categorise — part ghost story, part love letter to bookselling, part reckoning with 2020 — but which coheres through Tookie's voice, one of Erdrich's funniest and most immediate narrators.
Ready to Read The Sentence?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: