Tag: All Souls Day

02 - Regional U.S.A. Tour SRC, Audiobooks, C - Midwest RUSA, Contemporary Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Print, Realistic Fiction, Starlight Book Reviews, Women's Fiction

Starlight Book Review – Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence – 🇺🇸

The Starry Night Elf
Cover of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich on a light cyan background |
Image Source: Goodreads

RUSA SRC – Region #3 Midwest – Minnesota

4/5 I first recall seeing Louise Erdrich on one of the genealogy I enjoy. As I often do, I shelved a number of Erdrich’s books on my To Be Read (TBR) Shelf. Still, it took me until this year to shift any of her books from my TBR. I selected The Sentence as one of Midwestern entries for the Regional U.S.A. (RUSA) Tour Stellar Reading Challenge (SRC) as its set in Minnesota.

Click here to learn about the RUSA Tour SRC.

Trigger Warnings (TW): The Sentence contains references to illicit drug use and overdose, human trafficking, inappropriate handling of corpses, police brutality, and institutionalized racism..

“The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book… A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning… The Sentence begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 and ends on All Souls’ Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.”

I found The Sentence intriguing, especially with how Erdrich inserted herself as a minor character and set the book at Birchbark Books. Some of what main character Tookie endured forced me to set aside The Sentence for a little bit, reading the book in bursts. The Sentence impressed me but I found I read it too soon after events of 2020. Maybe I might revisit the book in a few years.

Check out more information on Erdrich’s Birchbark Books & Native Arts by clicking here.

Quotes come from book flaps/cover and are featured on color blocks.