Ratings3
Average rating4.3
"Dazzling. . . . A hard-won love letter to readers and to booksellers, as well as a compelling story about how we cope with pain and fear, injustice and illness. One good way is to press a beloved book into another's hands. Read The Sentence and then do just that."--USA Today, Four Stars In this New York Times bestselling novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors. Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention," must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.
Reviews with the most likes.
I really really loved the main story (love/ghost story), as well as the fact that the fictional narrative is set in the author's real bookstore (she even makes an entertaining and revealing cameo) and the characters are all connected to it.
The only thing that felt a bit odd for me was the inclusion of covid and the George Floyd protests - I'm not really sure why, maybe it's too soon? It already felt quite dated because of this (I know, it's crazy considering that the pandemic is not over at all yet, but the emotions of the early covid era make me feel nostalgic now which was definitely not author's intention).
What an awesome audiobook. I loved this so much. There are lots of deep themes here: indigenous issues, COVID-19, BLM and George Floyd to name a few. Throw in a haunted book store and you never know what's coming next.
Louise is such a gifted storyteller. The book was vivid, funny, heart wrenching and informative. Loved it.