Charles's Reviews > The Sentence

The Sentence introduced me to Louise Erdrich’s writing, admittedly late in the game. I’m of two minds, in the end, and felt like I wasn't the right audience for this title, yet I can find countless ways to praise the book. Mild spoilers below.

The daily operations of an Indigenous-owned indie bookstore in Minneapolis provide a captivating background for this story, as the lives of a handful of women play out around the onset of everyone’s favorite pandemic.

Using a modest bookshop was a neat trick to pull, by the way, if you just discovered like I did that Erdrich is also a real-life bookstore owner. Present yet remote in this tale is a literally self-effaced character, called Louise. You either roll eyes at this or you don’t. I didn’t.

Instead of her, the novel sets its gaze on an employee named Tookie, anyway. Rambunctious would be too strong a word, I guess, plus Tookie is an adult, but that woman is anything but your average salesperson.

It's not just her: a small crew of friendly weirdos sells books in there. Outside of the characters’ conversations, the antics grow ever wilder in The Sentence, which becomes a bit of a carnival and a bit of a soap opera. Louise Erdrich pushed the entertainment factor further than I expected, and Tookie “feels” a lot, carrying part of her teenage candidness into middle age, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

Compelling to me was the casual use of Indigenous references in the characters’ lives, at home and at the store, combining ancient traditions and modern-day living into a current culture and political landscape made entirely relatable - in fact, recognizable. I enjoyed reading about it the same way I did when I read There There by Tommy Orange, not that long ago. The tone sets these two books apart, with Erdrich feeling playful all the while also covering existential topics, sometimes raw ones. The George Floyd murder makes it into the timeline, for instance, and the novel comes packed with family scenes and current affairs colliding every which way. A lot of what I enjoyed in this book had to do with the Indigenous perspective, regardless of the moment.

Conversely, the presence of supernatural elements didn’t always work in favor of The Sentence, in my opinion. A main story thread got out of hands – I was anxious to be rid of it – while a secondary one mollified me slightly more, but only slightly. I wouldn’t have protested if both these threads had been more abstracted; the secondary one does earn its charm mostly by way of allusion, as it is. One minute I’d be enjoying a scene where people share a meal of wild rice and emit opinions about which crop's origin is best and why, leaving me completely under the spell, and the next I’d be wondering if all the theatricals in some next scene were necessary. I liked that the story had bounce and a positive outlook, yet sometimes I wished for it to pull back.

As an unexpected perk, The Sentence comes with a neat list of real-life titles that I intend to use, with some like On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong that I’ve already read, but many that I haven’t. Again, a fun gesture from the bookstore lady, in a book that goes (sometimes shamelessly) for your heart.