I’ve read a lot of books where authors have carefully crafted stories and characters exploring the love of writing. This story though is about a love of reading and, more specially, love of a local bookstore. Ex-con, turned retail saleswoman at an Indigenous-owned bookstore Tookie loves to read. Tookie loves to recommend books and rattles off a tremendous amount of titles and authors. She loves her customers as well…even after one of them decides to haunt the store.

Do you ever feel stuck in time in 2020? I certainly do. So it resonated with me how the book captures that time perfectly as the bulk of the action takes place in Minneapolis between November 2nd (All Souls Day) 2019 and November 2nd, 2020. It covers all the anxiety and intensity of early-COVID, small business uncertainty, and the explosion of protest activity after George Floyd’s murder. It covers just about every stressful national event from that year apart from the election and the conspiracy nuts who tried to claim that the election had been rigged. The Sentence reads to me like a work of historical fiction only the time period that Erdrich is writing about still feels like current events.