The Sentence

The Sentence 

by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Perhaps it is a foreshadowing of things to come that my first book of the year was so wonderful! I have read several of Erdrich's novels over the years and have liked some more than others. This one was outstanding. It is the story of Tookie whose life has been difficult but who finds herself when this story begins in a place from which she can hold things together. There are lots of threads to this story, including the Covid pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, identity, the power of literature, and what it means to love.

"For a while in my life I'd lived with the certainty that I would be held in love, and now I was sleeping in a parking lot." 

"Walking is a feat of controlled falling. Like life, I guess."

At the end of the novel is a long list of books grouped under varios headings and related to the story in some way. (I love novels with bibliographies!) These are books from that list that I am considering adding to my TBR:

• poetry by Joy Harjo--not sure yet which book ("indigenous poetry")
• The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald ("short perfect novels")
• The Vixen by Francine Prose ("Books for banned love")
• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro ("Sublime books")

Review: The Round House

The Round House
by Louise Erdrich

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The plot of this novel centers on a boy whose mother is attacked and raped and how he reacts to that event. He is a well drawn character and his story is a page turner. However, the book is padded with lectures on the injustice of the US legal system toward native tribes and with gratuitous background information on characters from other Erdrich books. The legal issues are relevant to the story, but the way the information is inserted into the narrative is clumsy and detracts from, rather than supporting, the story being told about this woman and her situation. I also felt like there were things going on with the woman and her husband that as a reader I wanted to know, but couldn't because the son being the only narrator limited our view--we are literally closed out of the rooms where changes in her responses to the attack occur.