The Sentence

Product Information

Vanguard, The Patriotic (December 2, 2021). "2021 Pulitzer prize winner Louise Erdrich". The Patriotic Vanguard . Retrieved December 29, 2022.

The Sentence is also a very immediate book -- straight out of our time (at this time), a chronicle of the Covid- and George Floyd-years.The Sentence is definitely character driven. We will meet Pollux' complicated daughter as well as Tookie's fellow workers at the store. And with every opportunity around every corner, Erdrich will insert matters for the mind. As other readers of this novel will tell you, early 2020 with the pandemic in full force and the riots after the murder of George Floyd will leave a bitter ache. Walking through the streets of these events, especially with the pandemic still in our midst, is going to be heavy and heartbreaking. But it's all part of Tookie's existence at the time as well. Talk about the “Indian wannabes”, as Tookie calls them. You know, the “I was Indian in a former life” or “my grandma was an Indian” tropes. Like that woman in blue who wanted to share stories of her grand whoever who helped the starving Indians (but wasn’t willing to give up the land to them)…the same woman then who later dropped off the bones.

Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas". Hanksville.org . Retrieved October 23, 2013.LH: Tookie honed her love of books while behind bars. How did you get inside the head of someone who thinks she’s going to be spending 60 years in prison? The joy of Erdrich’s novels lies in the way her characters live so richly, and are as present to the reader as our own friends and relatives are." - Erica Wagner, The Guardian The plot threads are numerous and so varied they shouldn’t work together but somehow they do, which makes this such an interesting and absorbing book. Except for one element. This book was marketed as a ghost story set in a bookshop, which for a book-blogger and bibliophile sounds like a brilliant premise. However, the ghost story isn’t atmospheric or interesting and also takes a side-line to politics and the covid pandemic which seemed a bit of a shame. At 50% I still had no idea where the book was going and realised that I didn’t really care either way – I wasn’t gripped or hooked with the plot to want to find out more. Comments on literature - the bookshop workers commonly recommending books to or discussing them with their customers

The book felt very jumbled as well that didn’t help. Lots of drawn-out conversations that didn’t seem to move the plot forward and then suddenly a major event would be introduced and skimmed over in a sentence which led to me saying ‘wait, what?’ and having to re-read. After reading a spoiler for the end of the book, I don’t think I particularly missed much - the reader asking a question about it also seemed to have missed an important plot point which meant the conclusion made little sense so I think I may have made the right decision in putting it down. a b Halliday, Lisa (Winter 2010). "Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction". The Paris Review. Winter 2010 (208). It becomes a challenge, figuring out how to cope with this unwanted visitor. Why was she there, in the bookstore in particular, and what would it take to get her to leave? Flora had been found with an open book, a very old journal, The Sentence: An Indian Captivity 1862-1883. The book seems to be implicated in Flora’s passing. Tookie tries to figure out if the book had a role to play in Flora’s death. There might be a perilous sentence in the book. Erdrich is best known as a novelist, and has published a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels. [14] She followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen (1986), which continued her technique of using multiple narrators [31] and expanded the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II. Leslie Marmon Silko accused Erdrich's The Beet Queen of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples. [32]The haunting in Tookie’s life becomes literal in the personage of Flora, who when living was one of Tookie’s most annoying bookstore customers. Tookie refers to Flora as a “stalker — of all things Indigenous,” or else as a “very persistent wannabe.” She’s a white woman who’s fixated on Native culture, claiming variously to have been an Indian in a previous life or to have had Indigenous heritage that her family hushed up. Annoyingly, Flora also does a lot of good things for Minneapolis’s Native community — fundraisers, volunteer work, fostering Native teen runaways — so Tookie feels compelled not to call her out on her overreach. a b Erdrich, Louise (2014). Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. Harper Perennial. pp.52, 57. ISBN 978-0-06-230996-9. In the early years of their marriage, Erdrich and Michael Dorris often collaborated on their work, saying they plotted the books together, "talk about them before any writing is done, and then we share almost every day, whatever it is we've written" but "the person whose name is on the books is the one who's done most of the primary writing. [15]" They got started with "domestic, romantic stuff" published under the shared pen name of "Milou North" (Michael + Louise + where they live). [11]