The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

When I took The Sentence by Louise Erdrich home to read over the holidays it was an unexpected highlight.  Tookie is an imperfect narrator and I loved her all the more for it.  She is an indigenous woman who made a spectacularly bad life choice that landed her in jail.  When her high school teacher sends her a dictionary, she finds that words and books allow her to serve her sentence and have a life after incarceration.  Her life after is that of a bookseller.  She shares her joy of the written word with all the customers.  She also deals with a resentful adopted daughter, who comes home with a baby just in time for Covid, and also civil unrest and protests after the murder of the George Floyd.  Erdrich also makes an appearance as a minor character in her own book.  I love a little meta.  Did I mention there is also a ghost?  Some customers just don’t know when to leave the store.

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