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A casual consumer of U.S. popular culture could assume Native Americans were extinct.
This remove is by design.
You could read this immediacy as an act of defiance.
The word urgent is a favorite of book blurbers and reviewers.The Sentencehas me rethinking its value.
Its not even on its last legs.
Like any story begging for an option,The Sentenceopens with a dead body.
He doles out a sentence of 60 years.
In prison, Tookie is haunted by Budgies ghost; she hears him hissing through his rotten teeth.
The most important skill I gained in prison, she jokes, was how to read with murderous attention.
This serves her well on the outside.
She gets the gig.
The bookstore setting is intriguing.
Tookie is not entirely surprised to see Flora again.
Shewouldhaunt the store, she thinks to herself.
Thats entitlement for you.
That acquisition is literalized in the context of the bookstore.
In death, Flora raises the ante.
If, per Rodriguez, Indians must be ghosts, then Flora has now achieved a kind of self-actualization.
Alone at the bookstore, Tookie hears someone whisper in her ear: Let me in.
As the book moves deeper into fictionalizing 2020, though, Floras ghost starts to feel like a sideshow.
Yet it is the protests for racial justice that really giveThe Sentenceits urgency, for better and for worse.
The MPD has fucking done this to Indians since the beginning of this city.
No, before that.
They practiced on us in the Dakota War and ever since.
I hesitate to complain about moments like this in a country so stubbornly committed to ignorance.
It is worth recalling that 2020 wasa big year for books, and minority-owned bookstores especially.
These letdowns are precisely what makeThe Sentencefeel dated.
Because the alternative is truly scary.
