The Sentence

Product Information

Observations on life as a native American in modern America - and in particular on interactions with non-indigenous people, including those who believe firmly they are not just empathetic to your plight but even (like Flora) somehow are part of it.

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. Protesters gathered at Chicago Ave. and East 38 th Street in South Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd - image and text from Minneapolis Star Tribune Karen Louise Erdrich ( / ˈ ɜːr d r ɪ k/ ER-drik; [1] born June 7, 1954) [2] is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people. [3] Louise Erdrich is an author I’ve been wanting to read for years. Over that time I’ve accumulated several of her novels, and finally, I’ve read one with The Sentence. I would also have to say that reading this novel - which I largely enjoyed - I noted firstly that (to me like so many literary American novels) the world outside the US barely exists (other interestingly than in the large number of non-American authors mentioned) and secondly that the novel seemed to me very American - almost as if I was slightly excluded from what it took for granted.

BookBrowse Review

In 2001, at age 47, Erdrich gave birth to a daughter, Azure, fathered by a Native American man Erdrich declines to identify publicly. [20] She discusses her pregnancy with Azure, and Azure's father, in her 2003 non-fiction book, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. [21] She uses the name "Tobasonakwut" to refer to him. [22] [23] He is described as a traditional healer and teacher, who is eighteen years Erdrich's senior and a married man. [22] [21] In a number of publications, Tobasonakwut Kinew, who died in 2012, is referred to as Erdrich's partner and the father of Azure. [24] That acquisition is literalized in the context of the bookstore. It attracts affluent white Minnesotans like Flora who want to forge a connection while still feeling like they are in control, because they are there to buy things. In death, Flora raises the ante. If, per Rodriguez, “Indians must be ghosts,” then Flora has now achieved a kind of self-actualization. Settlers are famously insatiable, and Flora, in spirit form, can possess in ways previously unavailable to her. Alone at the bookstore, Tookie hears someone whisper in her ear: “Let me in.” As the book moves deeper into fictionalizing 2020, though, Flora’s ghost starts to feel like a sideshow. COVID first enters the picture in the context of a book tour for fictional Louise, her daughters getting anxious as people crowd around her at a local reading. Yet it is the protests for racial justice that really give The Sentence its urgency, for better and for worse. LE: I briefly worked with prisoners in North Dakota’s state penitentiary, and then with the Women’s Prison Book Project here in Minnesota. So I knew that reading was one of the few activities afforded inmates, and sometimes the only way to escape the four walls or to connect with what’s going on outside. a b "Adopted daughter sues Michael Dorris estate, alleging sex abuse". AP NEWS . Retrieved November 6, 2019.

Tookie does her best, which is normally pretty good, but she does manage to put her foot in it every now and then; as she notes: "doing the wrong thing in general was my nature". There are a variety of 'sentences' in The Sentence, but among the most significant is a nearly life-defining legal one meted out, which Tookie recounts at the outset. Pretty much out of the blue -- for her -- the sentence is then also commuted, after seven years, and Tookie is free again. The Sentence is a fine novel of our recent times, with a few more layers to it -- a solid and fairly fast read.The Sentence veers pretty wildly between emotional tones. Tookie’s theft of Budgie’s body is very madcap and fun, and then her early days at the bookstore are settled and restrained and slice-of-life-esque. By the time Erdrich gets into the pandemic and the protests over George Floyd’s murder, she’s writing something close to narrative nonfiction. For me, the shifting tones work because of the lightness of Erdrich’s touch. What did you think? Tookie's household also grows, with the appearance of Pollux's niece, "inherited" from one of his brothers, Hetta, complete with newborn Jarvis. LH: T he Sentence takes on a lot of serious topics—being in prison; the pandemic; the George Floyd murder, which took place in Minneapolis; the injustices Native Americans suffer. But it’s also a ghost story with a lot of dark humor. Erdrich is best known as a novelist, and has published a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels. [14] She followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen (1986), which continued her technique of using multiple narrators [31] and expanded the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II. Leslie Marmon Silko accused Erdrich's The Beet Queen of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples. [32]

A casual consumer of U.S. popular culture could assume Native Americans were extinct. Save some recent wins, like the Hulu series Reservation Dogs, Indigenous people have more often appeared in the American imaginary as relics of a conveniently distant past. In horror movies, the trope of the Indian burial ground is deployed as a threat to the fantasy of white suburban innocence. In the 1960s, countercultural movements adopted Native American dress and customs like peyote as markers of pre-industrial, pre-urbane simplicity. This remove is by design. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez put it in Days of Obligation, “Indians must be ghosts,” for “Indians represented permanence and continuity to Americans who were determined to call this country new.” It’s not uncommon for Americans to claim Indigenous ancestry, often with no more evidence than a great-great-grandparent with “high cheekbones” — an epidemic of self-identification that some Indigenous scholars have called “ Cherokee syndrome.” Time and distance are key here: They allow for the distinction between native and settler to be collapsed, while preserving as much racial purity as possible. Tookie's voice is genuine and humorous, her perspective rich with history, literacy, and quietly simmering fury. Erdrich's fictional account of Tookie's pandemic experience, as singular and as universal as anyone's, resonates with strange and familiar detail (...) but doesn't blend consistently with her tale of the phantom Flora." - Mary Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly Erdrich makes a cameo in this book! She’s the owner of the store where Tookie works, which bears a striking resemblance to Erdrich’s real-life bookstore, Birchbark Books. How does her appearance here strike you? An ideal boostore-worker, Tookie is obsessed with books, and enthusiastic about helping people find the right ones: "I would rescue him with books", she says about one customer, and even if she knows books aren't always the answer, they are certainly her main go-to. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.

Need Help?

Erdrich's interwoven series of novels have drawn comparisons with William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels. Like Faulkner's, Erdrich's successive novels created multiple narratives in the same fictional area and combined the tapestry of local history with current themes and modern consciousness. [46] Birchbark Books [ edit ]