The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

This author is a wonder. First of all, she has produced two amazing yet very different novels in two years. Next, both of them feature her in some way within them. Best of all, this is set within real time in Minnesota, so it has both the pandemic and George Floyd. Finally, we should strive to suport independent bookstores, because they are labors of love for those who work in them and at them. This is a ghost story set within a greater story. The narrator, Tookie, is a convicted body snatcher with a hard-won appreciation for the words used to build stories. She opens the novel by announcing, “While in prison, I received a dictionary.” She immediately looked up the word “sentence” because, she notes, “I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an afterlife.” This very subtle but real reminder that brown and black people do not get a fair shake from the law. Tookie gets a break, after reading every book in the prison library, an is released from prison decades earlier than she’d feared. Because she’d spent so long dreaming of a wider selection than the prison’s limited book collection, she decides to look for a job in a bookstore. Only one employer responds to her résumé: “a modest little place” that specializes in Native American literature and is owned by a novelist named Louise. We see the world through Tookie's eyes and in the very end, there is an extensive reading list for the rest of us to work on, courtesy of Tookie.