In 2014, renowned Native American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich sat down to write a novel about a haunted bookstore. It wasn’t until the COVID pandemic shaped the way we viewed the world and interacted with each other did that story find life in today’s Book Club Spotlight, The Sentence. Written in real time from 2019 to 2020, Erdrich explores the complex emotions of our shifting cultural landscape and reckons with the difficult present from inside her Minneapolis bookstore.
After an unfortunate stint in prison, Tookie’s life is finally going right. She has a loving husband (the man who arrested her), and a wonderful job at a local Indigenous-run bookstore where she prides herself on matching difficult customers with the perfect book. In November 2019, one of her most difficult customers moved into the fiction section…permanently. Ghosts and bookstores don’t seem like too bad of a match, but the suspicious circumstances of Flora’s death around an old diary, the novel coronavirus, and growing unrest in her home of Minneapolis, Minnesota begins to topple her new life and family.
“I want to forget this year, but I’m also afraid I won’t remember this year. I want this now to be the now where we save our place, your place, on earth.”
– Louise Erdrich
The Sentence, like Erdrich’s previous novels, explores contemporary life as an Indigenous person in the upper Midwest, with all its heartache and laughter intertwined. As we continue to observe Native American Heritage Month and reflect on our country’s history, this novel is a thoughtful way to open up the discussion around America’s disposition of its Indigenous people. Their removal still haunts us today in the land, the culture, and the resilient survivors, much like the haunting of The Sentence’s bookstore is a colonization in itself. For Adult Book Clubs, they will find a novel that celebrates the humanism and community optimism unique to a flash in the pan moment during the COVID pandemic as a way to digest the more difficult moments. Erdrich wrote through the pandemic with Tookie as her guide. A messy, witty, and loveable protagonist to work through the continuing loss and uncertainty.
This novel features a fictionalized version of Erdrich’s independent bookstore Birchbark Books as it navigates a ghost, the pandemic, and a shifting cultural landscape. With people staying home and the ever growing online retail sites, now more than ever, independent bookstores live and die by their community. With the holidays coming up, consider stopping by your local bookstore for presents and to support your literary community!
“Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters”
Further Resources:
If you’re interested in requesting The Sentence for your book club, you can find the Request Form here. There are 5 copies (A librarian must request items)
Erdrich, Louise. The Sentence. Harper Perennial. (2021)
