Glimpses of historical artifacts and personal anecdotes elsewhere also inject horrific glimpses of the past which bleed directly into the relationship between Tookie and Flora. Flora’s undead state connects to questions about the co-existence between racial groups and also the deathless continuity of wrongdoing, and remembering. At the plot’s forefront is Flora, a customer of the bookstore who dies but then returns to haunt the shop generally and Tookie in particular. Nightmares do occur later in The Sentence, notably in what it reveals of racism’s long and continuing history and the abuse of minorities, but the prevailing tone is snappy and upbeat. The melodramatic opening may introduce appropriate themes but could conceivably belong to a more insistently nightmarish tale.

(Erdrich herself owns Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in that city, and this is where Tookie works, with Erdrich making modest appearances.) The novel’s proper heart and tone emerge here, in a broad, inviting portrait of Native American lives at work and play, and later grappling with Covid and the murder of George Floyd. Later, the reader may feel this semi-prologue, with its focus on prison and despair, doesn’t seem quite in step with the rest of the novel, the larger part of which is devoted to Tookie’s community of workers, customers and family in Minneapolis. This act leads swiftly to her arrest, trial and incarceration for a decade, but also, subsequently, to her rebirth as a bookshop worker devoted to literature and to a relationship with Pollux, the Native policeman who arrested her. The Sentence may not yet be Louise Erdrich’s most celebrated work – her backlist includes Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners – nevertheless this latest novel is an immersive, impactful, politically astute, love-drenched, subtle, often comic work which touches deftly on many important issues, from books and Indigenous lives, to death and hauntings.ĭeath indeed enfolds the story which opens with central character Tookie’s fateful choice to help a friend dispose of a corpse.

The sentence novel