My Goodreads and Amazon review of The Sentence by Louse Erdrich (Rating 3) – Too Much, Too Soon. What is The Sentence by Louise Erdrich about? The novel meanders through crime and punishment, love, a large Native American cast, the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, a bookstore ghost, and a line of rugaroos. By the end, you’ve consumed a whole sheet of half-baked cookies and wish you’d eaten only two fully baked ones. The current events, still raw, were even more so when Erdrich wrote about them. Writers, myself included (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), choose different genres to serve different ends. Journalism is a contemporaneous report; memoir recaptures thoughts and feelings experienced in another moment. Fiction imagines and reflects, processes enhanced by time and distance. In her haste to comment, Erdrich feeds readers a lump of indigestible dough. She should have stuck to writing about that ghost, whose sections alone bring the book to life.
