In life Flora was sincere, well-intentioned, generous, a hard person to dismiss or ignore. The haunting comes when Flora, one of Tookie’s most annoying regular customers, a white woman who claims to have indigenous lineage, a claim Tookie doesn’t buy for a minute, dies. “A job with regular hours after which I come home to a regular husband.” She lives, she says, the way a person does who has ceased to dread each day’s ration of time.

“Now I live as a person with a regular life,” Tookie says. Other than that complication, life with Pollux is tender and loving. Pollux has a daughter, Hetta, with whom Tookie has a bumpy relationship. Tookie reunites with Pollux, the tribal policeman who arrested her all those years before. Matching a customer with the perfect recommendation brings Tookie intense satisfaction. She doesn’t simply love books, she reveres them, communes with them. She finds work and community in a bookstore. Minneapolis has changed, as Tookie discovers on long bus rides through the city. She survives solitary confinement by recalling passages from the books she has read.Īfter seven years in Waseca prison, Tookie’s sentence is commuted and she’s set free. For this she’s placed in the segregation unit for a year, stripped of her books and her precious American Heritage dictionary. Tookie is claustrophobic and so terrified of confinement that she tries to kill herself by tearing up her prison-issued paper clothing and stuffing her nose and mouth. Though admittedly guilty, there are mitigating circumstances, not that it matters to the sentencing judge. I am not about teachable moments.” Tookie is self-aware, probably because of her years in prison, which is where she begins her story, recounting how she was sentenced to sixty years for stealing a body.

“Not the kind of ugly that guys write or make movies about, where suddenly I have a blast of blinding instructional beauty. I am an ugly woman, the narrator, whose name is Tookie, tells us. But it’s also about the love of books and words and stories, and the life-altering power of reading. It’s a finely crafted polymorphous novel, part ghost story, part family drama, part redemptive tale, set in Minneapolis during the fractious spring and summer of 2020 when the pandemic raged and George Floyd was murdered by the police. My reading future will definitely include many books from Louise Erdrich’s canon.

Fortunately, it’s never too late to “discover” an author and be spun off into a new reading universe. I’ve seen her name on lists of best books in literary journals and other places, and knew that she’d won a Pulitzer Prize, but despite the fact that one of her early novels, Love Medicine, has sat on my shelf for nearly three years, as if waiting patiently for me to chance upon it, I’d not read her.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to read Louise Erdrich.

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