MANY INGREDIENTS HERE. The main one is a ghost story. The narrator, who works in a bookstore, thinks she is being haunted. I'm not sure whether we, the readers, are supposed to accept the haunting as actual or to see the narrator as under a compelling delusion. A bit like James's Turn of the Screw, let's say. I (and some of the narrator's fellow employees) think the haunting is real, but several members of my book club thought the narrator (who has had a difficult past, serving time for a crime she was set up for by "friends") was having an episode.
We also have some nice workplace comedy. Erdrich owns a bookstore in the Twin Cities (a very nice one, Birchbark Books) and the depiction of bookstore culture is lovely. It got me thinking that someone should set a sitcom in a bookstore--I guess they tried that with Ellen, and it didn't quite take off, but the idea still appeals to me.
Then there is the time setting. Twin Cities, All Souls Day 2019 to All Souls Day 2020--which means we get COVID and the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests.
On top of all that, the narrator, Tookie, is indigenous, and the ghost, Flora, is a particularly annoying instance of a Euro-Anglo-American becoming obsessed with a romanticized idea of indigenous cultures, so the haunting is wrapped up in the issue of cultural appropriation. (The title refers to a sentence in a unique book Flora has appropriated, the reading of which was so shocking to her self-conception as practically indigenous herself that it killed her.)
I like Louise Erdrich, but there may be too many eggs in this pudding. It's a swift read, though, and the book club liked it.
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