Tookie, a Native American woman living in Minneapolis, is
arrested for stealing a corpse. Plus,
said corpse had crack cocaine hidden in his armpits. After ten years in prison reading
voraciously, Tookie lands a job at an independent bookstore and marries her
arresting officer, Pollux. Then her most
annoying customer, Flora, who wishes that she herself were Native American,
dies. All is well, but things have to
start going awry or we don’t have a story worth telling. Flora’s ghost haunts the bookstore, George
Floyd is murdered, and Covid-19 causes life as we know it to grind to a halt. Then there’s the double meaning of the title. First, Tookie has to endure a prison
sentence, and Flora seems to be serving a sentence of being trapped between the
land of the living and the afterlife. On
the other hand, this book is largely about books, and Tookie believes that a
particular sentence in a book killed Flora when she read it. As with all Erdrich novels, this one serves
up a heavy dose of fascinating Native American beliefs and traditions,
including how to evict a ghost. Erdrich
also inhabits her own book here, as the writer who owns the bookstore. I love how she describes herself and hope
that her real-life bookstore is as welcoming and full of warmth as the one in
this novel. What ghost would not want to
reside there?
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