The Sentence
A Native American bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted by the ghost of its most difficult customer, set against the real events of 2020: George Floyd's murder outside the window, pandemic lockdowns, the uprising. Erdrich makes the immediate historical into literature with characteristic grace.
The book keeps changing shape: it opens as a body-snatching crime caper, settles into a ghost story, then pivots at the midpoint into a novel about the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, and one reader describes the effect bluntly: “I had to hit my internal ‘reset’ button” with each turn. The haunting itself disappoints readers expecting real dread; one flatly says “Flora was too over the top for me,” and another agrees “the ghost story isn’t atmospheric or interesting.” Erdrich narrating her own audiobook splits opinion sharply too, with one reader singling out “letting the author read the audio book” as the edition’s weak link.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
