The Sentence

Tookie, an Ojibwe woman in Minneapolis, serves part of an outrageously long prison sentence and learns to read with a fierce, murderous attention. Once she is out, working at a small independent bookstore comes naturally. Among its artists and book lovers she starts making a new life.

Then Flora, the store's most persistent customer, dies, and her ghost will not leave. On All Soul's Day she returns to haunt the shop, and Tookie in particular. Why Flora has come leads Tookie and Asema, a fellow Ojibwe bookseller, to a shocking personal discovery with roots in history.

Tookie also has a marriage to manage. Pollux, who has loved her for years, proposes, and they wed. He is the tribal police officer who arrested her long ago, for a crime more serious than she knew at the time.

Whether they can get past that betrayal and trust each other may deepen their love or end it.

The book runs from All Soul's Day 2019 to All Soul's Day 2020, a year of disease, violence and political upheaval in which hauntings seem to spread well beyond the bookstore. Identity, appropriation and violence done in the name of justice weigh on ordinary lives throughout. Reading it is emotional and unhurried, with a love story alongside the haunting.