cover blurb - The Sentence by Louise Erdrich asks what we owe to the living, to the dead, to the reader, and to the book. A small independent bookstore is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020. Flora, an incredibly annoying customer died on All Soul's Day and will not leave. Tookie, the owner, has to solve the haunting plus try to understand a year in Minneapolis full of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
Tookie, the bookstore owner, spent time in prison. Her first book from a teacher was a dictionary. She looked up the word "sentence" after being sentenced to sixty years. The word "sentence" sounds so easy and yet proved to be a challenge.
Erdrich writes of rich characters and complex emotions. It's well written and interesting with the comings and going in a bookstore, with the added bonus of Flora who's seeking attention by knocking books off shelves, sending signals from her afterlife. There is a lot of emotion involved, flashbacks to prison time, plus the Covid year conditions. Well done!
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