Book Recommendations For Native American Heritage Month

I'm a bit late with this post in celebrating Native American Heritage Month!! 

I recently discovered an article on Good Housekeeping Magazine's website titled, 32 Best Books by Native American and Indigenous Authors to Add to Your Bookshelf by Sarah Vincent and Lizz Schumer.

I've read and reviewed The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (I truly enjoyed this one), Heart Berries by Therese Marie Mailhot (I didn't enjoy this one), and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (I loved this one!). All three of these were mentioned in the Good Housekeeping article.

I have There, There by Tommy Orange, To The Moon & Back by Eliana Ramage, The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty, Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer on my reading wishlist.

Have you read any of the books listed in the Good Housekeeping article? If so, which ones and what did you think of them?

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

 I listened to the unabridged audio version of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and narrated by the author. This is my first experience with anything written by Louise Erdrich. 

I'm so grateful that I finally took the step to read a novel by Louise Erdrich!! Louise Erdrich's writing is amazing and The Sentence covers a lot of ground, so you're in for a good ride.

What did I like about The Sentence? Just about everything. The writing is great and so is the storyline. I loved the characters for this novel as well... I especially loved the main character, Tookie! I enjoyed the indigenous bookstore set in Minnesota. The bookstore is a haunted bookstore as in that it's haunted by a difficult, former customer named, Flora, who had passed away recently. Flora makes the most problems for Tookie throughout most of the novel. Tookie and the rest of the staff try to figure out why Flora is haunting the bookstore and help her cross over to the other side. We read about the lives of those running the bookstore and a few of the customers as well as about Tookie's friends and family, which make for a great read.

The time period for The Sentence is an entire year from November 2019 to November 2020. So, the Covid-19 pandemic is front and center for much of the novel and how it effected people's live. Additionally, the George Floyd murder and riots to follow were also front and center. Not to mention the lives of Indigenous Americans were also front and center for this novel. Louise Erdrich writes about each topic so well and interweaves each topic together in such a way as to be seamless to the storyline, including the haunting of the bookstore that we read about throughout the novel. 

Louise Erdrich also appears as a minor character in her own novel. Also, I can only assume that the bookstore in the The Sentence is somewhat based on the author's own bookstore.

Below is the publisher's summary for The Sentence by Louise Erdrich from the Goodreads website:

In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.

Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention", must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

I am giving The Sentence by Louise Erdrich a rating of 4.5 stars out of 5 stars.

Until my next post, happy reading!!