La Crosse County Library's Reviews > The Sentence
The Sentence
by
by
La Crosse County Library's review
bookshelves: contemporary, cora, covid-19, culture, dark-humor, family, fiction, food-for-thought, friendship-goals, funny, humor, ilikegifsandicannotlie, iwriteinrunonsentences, mental-health-illness, minnesota, mother-daughter-relationships, native-american-author, page-turner, paranormal, magical-realism, seeing-the-world-through-a-book, race-racism, romance, the-queen-of-tags, the-destroyer, twists, tragedy, local-regional-authors, political, books-about-books, unashamed-bookworm, winter-read, 2022-review
Jan 18, 2022
bookshelves: contemporary, cora, covid-19, culture, dark-humor, family, fiction, food-for-thought, friendship-goals, funny, humor, ilikegifsandicannotlie, iwriteinrunonsentences, mental-health-illness, minnesota, mother-daughter-relationships, native-american-author, page-turner, paranormal, magical-realism, seeing-the-world-through-a-book, race-racism, romance, the-queen-of-tags, the-destroyer, twists, tragedy, local-regional-authors, political, books-about-books, unashamed-bookworm, winter-read, 2022-review
4.5/5 stars
I was listening to a podcast episode recently that described our collective pandemic moment as a sort of disjointedness, that such crises like COVID-19 have disconnected us from the future we envisioned for ourselves, leaving us adrift in time. This disjointedness is a very powerful presence in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
The Sentence is a story of an indigenous Minnesota woman, Tookie, whose life was upended first by a stint in jail, then by the COVID-19 pandemic and the concurrent haunting of the bookstore she now works at by a dead customer (Flora). As someone who doesn't believe in ghosts, I interpreted this haunting as more psychological than the presence of a specter in a horror novel--not that the horror was any less real.
And after thinking about the book's title more, it made the book's various threads come together, the "sentence" representing everything from Tookie's fierce love of books, her incarceration, her experience of COVID-19, and a personal sentence of suffering from unresolved childhood traumas. (view spoiler)
Anyways, armchair psychoanalysis aside, Erdrich's magical realism-infused story was written beautifully, in a hypnotic, almost haphazard way that ended up fitting together nicely in the end that evoked for me Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It was beautiful for all the good, bad, and in-between The Sentence contained.
As all good books do, they transport you back (or forward) in time so that the reader feels very much a part of the story, if not a main character, then a peripheral one. The Sentence took me back to 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a year I would prefer to forget for many reasons. I felt so powerfully that I was back there with Tookie and her friends and family that I had to take occasional breaks so I wouldn't feel overwhelmed.
The fear and uncertainty, a constant sense of dread. Empty store shelves. Overwhelmed hospitals. The increasing popularity of curbside pickup at all sorts of establishments--my library being no exception to that. Keep six feet apart, masks, hand sanitizers. George Floyd. Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
All of that was a visceral experience, from the events of 2020 themselves to the physical, emotional, and mental impacts.
It's no wonder that Tookie felt under pressure in various dimensions, from the external threat of COVID and continuing discrimination against people with black and brown skin to the suddenly manifest presence of Flora, a dead woman who won't leave her alone.
Can Tookie shake her ghost? How does everything play out for her and her loved ones during such chaotic times?
All I can say, before I proceed to spoil anything else, is to read The Sentence. What a powerful novel! A great start to my 2022 reading challenge.
-Cora
Find this book and other titles within our catalog.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>
I was listening to a podcast episode recently that described our collective pandemic moment as a sort of disjointedness, that such crises like COVID-19 have disconnected us from the future we envisioned for ourselves, leaving us adrift in time. This disjointedness is a very powerful presence in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
The Sentence is a story of an indigenous Minnesota woman, Tookie, whose life was upended first by a stint in jail, then by the COVID-19 pandemic and the concurrent haunting of the bookstore she now works at by a dead customer (Flora). As someone who doesn't believe in ghosts, I interpreted this haunting as more psychological than the presence of a specter in a horror novel--not that the horror was any less real.
And after thinking about the book's title more, it made the book's various threads come together, the "sentence" representing everything from Tookie's fierce love of books, her incarceration, her experience of COVID-19, and a personal sentence of suffering from unresolved childhood traumas. (view spoiler)
Anyways, armchair psychoanalysis aside, Erdrich's magical realism-infused story was written beautifully, in a hypnotic, almost haphazard way that ended up fitting together nicely in the end that evoked for me Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It was beautiful for all the good, bad, and in-between The Sentence contained.
As all good books do, they transport you back (or forward) in time so that the reader feels very much a part of the story, if not a main character, then a peripheral one. The Sentence took me back to 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a year I would prefer to forget for many reasons. I felt so powerfully that I was back there with Tookie and her friends and family that I had to take occasional breaks so I wouldn't feel overwhelmed.
The fear and uncertainty, a constant sense of dread. Empty store shelves. Overwhelmed hospitals. The increasing popularity of curbside pickup at all sorts of establishments--my library being no exception to that. Keep six feet apart, masks, hand sanitizers. George Floyd. Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
All of that was a visceral experience, from the events of 2020 themselves to the physical, emotional, and mental impacts.
It's no wonder that Tookie felt under pressure in various dimensions, from the external threat of COVID and continuing discrimination against people with black and brown skin to the suddenly manifest presence of Flora, a dead woman who won't leave her alone.
Can Tookie shake her ghost? How does everything play out for her and her loved ones during such chaotic times?
All I can say, before I proceed to spoil anything else, is to read The Sentence. What a powerful novel! A great start to my 2022 reading challenge.
-Cora
Find this book and other titles within our catalog.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>
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Quotes La Crosse County Library Liked
“There’s a word for your impulse, Louise. Cacoëthes, I said to her. The urge to do something somewhat wrong. Not something unspeakable or horrific. Just something you know is a bad idea.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“Nothing makes Penstemon happier than handing a favorite book to someone who wants to read it. I’m the same. I suppose you could say this delights us although ‘delight’ is a word I rarely use. Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“Louise texted me from Washington, D.C., to say that the reading at Politics and Prose had been as usual perfectly run with a madly intelligent crowd. ‘They made an announcement,’ she wrote. ‘No touching the author. And counters at hotels are sprouting bottles of hand sanitizer.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“I love statistics because they place what happens to a scrap of humanity, like me, on a worldwide scale.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“Asema. You're forgetting. A people who see themselves primarily as victims are doomed. And we're not doomed, are we?”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“haunted by image after image. People kneeling, beaten. People singing, beaten. Mothers, beaten. Fathers, beaten. Young, beaten. Old, knocked down or beaten. If you approached the police, beaten. If you ran away, kettled, then beaten. Pollux had known good people, seen lives saved by his fellow patrol officers. So who was doing the beating? The uniforms or those inside them? How was it that protests against police violence showed how violent police really”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“I had to get out of my surroundings the way I used to in prison. There, I had learned to read with a force that resembled insanity. Once free, I found that I could not read just any book. It had gotten so I could see through books--the little ruses, the hooks, the setup in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last page the author could whisk out the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite character.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“The jittery focus, the devastated shelves, a couple of fights breaking out over paper towels, a swarm descending on an employee trying to restock toilet paper, madness in people’s eyes—it was like the beginning of every show where the streets empty and some grotesque majestic entity emerges from mist or fire.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There’s nothing else.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“You can’t get over things you do to other people as easily as you get over things they do to you.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“Maybe this was what being in a pandemic brought forth. When everything big is out of control, you start taking charge of small things.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“policing of Indigenous people by white people on this continent goes back to the creation of occupying military forces bent on wars of extermination in both the U.S. and Canada.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘It was the bluecoats, the cavalry, the RCMP. Then Indian agents or the military chose tribal members to police their community. Once the Bureau of Indian Affairs was formed, it was BIA cops.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
“If I stepped off a cliff in that heart of his, he’d catch me. He’d put me back in the sun.”
― The Sentence
― The Sentence
Reading Progress
January 18, 2022
–
Started Reading
January 18, 2022
– Shelved
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
contemporary
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
cora
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
covid-19
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
culture
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
dark-humor
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
family
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
fiction
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
food-for-thought
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
friendship-goals
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
funny
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
humor
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
ilikegifsandicannotlie
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
iwriteinrunonsentences
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
mental-health-illness
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
minnesota
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
mother-daughter-relationships
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
native-american-author
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
page-turner
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
paranormal
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
magical-realism
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
seeing-the-world-through-a-book
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
race-racism
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
romance
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
the-queen-of-tags
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
the-destroyer
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
twists
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
tragedy
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
local-regional-authors
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
political
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
books-about-books
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
unashamed-bookworm
January 18, 2022
– Shelved as:
winter-read
January 18, 2022
–
Finished Reading
January 25, 2022
– Shelved as:
2022-review