Kathleen's Reviews > The Sentence

Tookie is a formidable Ojibwe woman with a compassionate heart. So, when her friend pleads for her to steal the body of her beloved from another woman, she agrees. What she did not know is that the body had cocaine taped to his armpits. Yup—she spent serious prison time for that mistake. When she is finally released, the tribal policeman that arrested her asks Tookie to marry him.

Louise Erdrich owns an independent bookstore in Minneapolis called Birchbark Books and much of the novel’s plot revolves around books. Tookie is an avid reader and gets a job at a bookstore. She has one customer, Flora, that visits the store nearly every day. This annoying person may have actually been killed by a book (long story). Five days after her death, Flora, starts haunting the bookstore for the next year.

Flora is not all that haunts Tookie in the year 2020. There is the deadly pandemic (before vaccines), the turmoil created by the death of George Floyd by police, and more. The disease and the Black Lives Matter protests personally touch upon Tookie’s family. Oh yes, and like other recent Erdrich novels, there is a touch of magical realism included too.