Jessica's Reviews > The Sentence

I went back and forth from liking the book to hating the book. The best part is the list of books at the end. Is all of Erdrich's writing a bunch of meandering or are other books of hers narratively tighter? Tookie is a good character but not good enough to make me not fast skim the last 50 pages.

Edit: I've actually returned the book, I was so mad at it. So much potential, such a wide miss.

I've thought about it more and can better express what annoyed me so much about the book. It is a massive missed opportunity for what could have been a very gripping story. The story that I was interested in - the mystery of the haunting, the murderous journal/book, the character who wrote the journal book, how all those elements tie together and rope in Tookie - that story was approximately a 2.5 page summary near the end of the book. And damn, had those stories been interwoven and fleshed out, comparisons drawn between past and present, shifting between timelines, well that would have been a very engaging and contemplative book.

Instead the focus never really fully made it on to these teasers and I was never really sure what the book was supposed to be about. Half way through the book shifted to COVID and the George Floyd protests, but not in a way that offered any kind of different perspective for anyone who was paying attention for the last 2 years. No new perspective was really added by so much story time being spent on these topics.

I was mostly left feeling really disappointed that I didn't get to know the writer of the journal and her story and see how the past influences and touches the present. Such great potential, so badly missed.

Also, I read the book in one weekend and didn't even remember the sort of familial connection of Tookie to Flora, so when the big reveal of Tookie's real name came about it just felt lazy. That's how little the connection was emphasized earlier in the book.

This was my first Erdrich and I'm not so convinced I should read more.