Who would have thought a wickedly funny ghost story could carry a lot of wisdom?
Set inside a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich unfolds across an unforgettable year, from November 2019 to November 2020. The haunting begins on All Souls’ Day, when Flora, the bookstore’s most insufferable regular customer, dies. The problem? She refuses to leave.
Tookie is a woman who lands a job selling books after years of incarceration, years she survived by reading with fierce, almost obsessive devotion. Her past is nothing short of wild: a friend once manipulated her into stealing a dead boyfriend’s body and returning it to her. Now, Tookie must untangle the mystery of Flora’s stubborn ghost while navigating everything Minneapolis lived through during that staggering year of grief, isolation, and furious reckoning.
And Flora isn’t the only uninvited presence.
Erdrich covers the ghost story with something far bigger, a portrait of Minneapolis life as COVID crept in during late 2019 and then erupted into full lockdown in 2020. Flora’s growing intrusiveness mirrors the pandemic’s own slow, then overwhelming takeover. Figuring out how to survive it all, personally and professionally, gives the story a weight that feels deeply real.
It sounds like the plot of a buzzy blockbuster film. Erdrich, however, pulls it off with such stunning literary finesse that the whole thing feels alive on the page.
Her genius here is also well-earned. Erdrich draws on a rich collection of books and literature throughout this novel, all of which are listed in the appendix. The depth of her reading pours into every page.
The Sentence is haunting and deeply perceptive. It wraps a lighthearted ghost story around the far more tender tale of a woman rebuilding herself after prison and somehow, it all holds together beautifully.
The title itself is a promise the book keeps. This novel is full of sentences that stop you mid-read. I found myself scribbling reactions in the margins and mumbling out loud more than once. Here are some that hit hardest, along with my honest, unfiltered thoughts:
“For many years now, I have asked myself why we are at the bottom, or at the highest worst, of everything measurable. Because I know we have greatness as a people. But perhaps our greatness lies in what isn’t measurable.”
This one cracked something open in me. A quiet salute as well as a little heartbreak (and sorry) for everyone whose greatness the world’s measuring systems will never be able to capture. That includes me, by the way.
“I worked hard, kept things tidy, curtailed my inner noise, stayed steady. And still, trouble found where I lived and tracked me down.”
Yep. Life is shitty and unfair, and this sentence says it with more elegance than most of us ever could.
“The world below feeds the world above.”
For context, this line is about trees, fossil fuels, the oil we drill and the minerals we dig up. Think a little deeper, though, and it becomes a sharp, almost uncomfortable reflection on how the poor and the middle class quietly (and endlessly!) feed the billionaire class.
“Things will improve when we start living on the top of the earth, on wind and light.”
Sadly, we live in a world where comfort and ease are unevenly distributed. Life does feel lighter when you are not the one carrying the heaviest load. Lighter still, perhaps, if you have the privilege of never having to think about any of this at all.
I would be happy to die. I would make sure that I did.
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
Author: Louise Erdrich
Publication date: 9 November 2021
Number of pages: 387 pages
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