Bearing Witness in a Fractured Moment

I admire this novel more for where it ultimately arrives than for how it begins. I’ve read through many of its lower-rated reviews, and my experience is almost entirely the opposite of most of their critiques. Where many readers felt hooked by the opening quarter of the book, I found it oddly disjointed—nearly alienating—and came close to abandoning the novel altogether. Simply put, the first twenty-five percent feels as though it belongs to a different story, one that hasn’t yet decided what kind of novel it wants to be.

What follows, however, is where The Sentence finds its footing—and its power. Once the narrative settles into the lived reality of late 2019 through 2020, the novel becomes quietly riveting. Few works of fiction have dared to engage so directly with the COVID-19 pandemic while also reckoning with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests in Minnesota. Erdrich doesn’t treat these events as mere backdrops; they pulse through the pages, shaping the emotional and psychological terrain of the characters’ daily lives.

Though fictional, the novel offers something rare: a near first-hand account of how Minnesota’s Indigenous communities experienced this overlapping era of grief, isolation, reckoning, and resistance. That perspective feels especially vital. Fiction has the unique ability to preserve emotional truth—something official histories often smooth over or sanitize. If we leave the telling of our recent past solely to institutions, nuance is lost, and memory becomes curated rather than felt.

Once the novel finds its rhythm, The Sentence reads almost like a day-in-the-life of its main character, Tookie, who moves through these extraordinary moments with quiet observation and resilience. At times, it feels Forrest Gump-like—history unfolding around her as she bears witness simply by existing within it. The result is a novel that may stumble at the start but ultimately earns its place as a meaningful record of a moment we are still grappling with.