I heard good things, great things even, about Louise Erdrich from a few book pals and ya know she also has won a Pulitzer (though not for this book) so I knew I wanted to check her out. I came upon a discounted copy of this book at my local bookstore and Bob’s your uncle I bought the book.
Aside: I typed that previous sentence and immediately thought, “Where does the idiom “Bob’s your uncle” even come from?!” A Google search says it’s unclear in origins but popularized in the UK as a way to say “there you are” or a task that is completed with ease. Back to our regularly scheduled review.
This book was a lurching one for me: I found the beginning jolting: at first, I couldn’t tell if the story set out to be humorous or serious as our protagonist Tookie gets arrested for moving a body across state lines (a body that she didn’t realize was full of drugs, thus making her act a felony). It was in fact not meant to be funny, but instead was a raw look at Tookie’s careless actions and stark consequences, and how her life unfolds afterward. She survives her period of incarceration by living in books and once on the outside, finds a job at a small local bookstore. After the death of a persistent and persnickety patron, Tookie senses her presence in the store and thus our real story begins, which covers the period of the haunting as well as the early days of the covid pandemic.
Until I was halfway through this book, I didn’t know that I wasn’t quite ready to read a pandemically-centered novel; for me, it felt entirely too soon. That said, I recently read Emily St. John Mandel’s newest novel which includes a pandemic in one of the timelines, but that felt like an echo that I could relate to. Reading about the start Covid-19 pandemic, the little bookstore trying to get by, the outrage in the summer of the swell of Black Lives Matter was too much too soon. And I guess also that’s a testament to her writing and storytelling: she perfectly captured this period of time, the uncertainty, the small moments of humanity, and so I still think it’s a good book and will read more of her writing, but I think I would have appreciated this book further in my own timeline.
