Lyn's Reviews > The Sentence

Books are essential.

I made a commitment to read more books from diverse authors and to poke my head out from under my SF/F rock and see what else is going on in the world in contemporary writing.

I’m so glad I did because I may not have otherwise read this remarkable book from award winning writer Louise Erdritch.

Erdritch is described as having a father who “is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa). She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance”.

This book is described as “a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors”.

Yep, all that.

First of all, I’m going to find out more about this Native American Renaissance and read more from Erdritch.

She begins with a description of a tragi-comic crime and arrest that introduces us to our protagonist – narrator, Tookie. I imagine Tookie as a big woman, a full of life troublemaker with a bad past and a self-destructive streak. Some time in prison has changed her a lot, as it will, and when she comes back, she has a new outlook but most of the same old problems.

One positive change, and one that really makes the book work so well, is that while incarcerated she learned to love books. Taking a job in a Minneapolis bookstore that specializes in Native American literature, Erdritch (who is apparently the owner of the store in a fun bit of inclusion) shows how Tookie is a dedicated and maybe a little scary bookseller.

Even scarier is when a dedicated but annoying regular customer dies and maybe come back to haunt the store. Erdritch approaches this aspect of the narrative with some gifted magical realism that also worked well considering the Indigenous themes addressed.

And then covid and George Floyd and Erdritch explores issues that are still going on and from a humanistic, Indigenous perspective that was both charming and thought provoking in many ways.

When bookstores are deemed to be essential to the economy and can stay open, the author’s depiction of this period, where the workers are struggling to keep the store open while observing pandemic cautions and finding connections to their customers was some of her best writing.

Tookie is a damaged heroine but not a victim and Erdritch’s portrayal of her as she tackles a variety of issues was a joy to read.

Highly recommended.