And…a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered.” We also meet Pollux, her husband, a former tribal police officer turned indigenous ceremony leader, and Flora, the white woman who so badly wants to claim indigeneity that her spirit haunts the bookstore and Tookie herself for a full year after her death. For the majority of the novel’s 372 pages, the reader exists as Tookie, a woman with “a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red. The abundance of detailing at times feels random, with seemingly inessential pieces of information thrown into various scenes in a way that does not feel entirely thought out, but the overall effect of this strategy is a cast of characters that are, for the most part, deeply understood. Erdrich’s writing is rich and very detailed.
The strongest point of this novel is how well-defined the characters are, how fleshy they feel. They practiced on us in the Dakota war and ever since.” The MPD has fucking done this to Indians since the beginning of this city. A lot of real estate in the book, which takes place in Minneapolis, is taken up by the violent aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, which Erdrich uses to highlight the integrity of Native and Black solidarity: “We have to stand with Black people because we know.
While The Sentence sells itself as a ghost story and is certainly not lacking in the ghost department, it is primarily a pandemic story, illustrating how the onset of COVID-19 affects Tookie, her husband and her stepdaughter as well as her family of bookstore co-workers. It is a sprawling work that chronicles main character Tookie’s journey from one-time body smuggler who wanted to impress a girl and earn $26,000 to incarcerated person to bookstore employee and wife.
The Sentence is the latest novel from Louise Erdrich, a prolific, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Ojibwe descent. And one unhaunted baby trailing clouds of glory.”
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