The Sentence

I wonder if people who have lived through traumatic periods of history ever truly want to read about that history, unprompted. Like, survivors of the Blitz when the first post-WWII books started coming out, or people who fought in Vietnam. Because while the good first half of this took place in the Before Covid Times, the second half was about George Floyd, and protests for BLM, and washing down one's groceries, and loved ones being on ventilators, and there being protocols that prevent you from being in the hospital with those or any other loved ones. And I can't decide if it's just too soon for me, or if I will ever be interested in truly revisiting 2020. I ask because I felt very detached from the second half of the book, in a way that I don't think I would have if this was ancient history, perhaps.

Maybe this was Erdrich's need to process, but we all have our own ways to process and reading another person's experience of a thing I'm also still experiencing was ... not my favorite. But I appreciated Tookie's story of her theft and incarceration, and I liked her relationships with her family and the bookstore and her coworkers, even if the ghost thing didn't make perfect sense to me. I liked the first half, focusing on all that stuff, way more than the second.

Also, I have not encountered this much in my reading, I don't think, but it totally threw me off to realize that Erdrich wrote herself into her book - it made me wonder how much of this was truly fiction and whether Tookie was indeed a real person, and and and.

Anyway, this makes it sound like all I have is complaints, but this WAS a compelling read, and I have another Erdrich already on my nightstand, so obviously it's not going to turn me off her as a writer or anything.