Even when she is not permitted to have them, she calls up a library in her head: “everything from the Redwall books to Huck Finn to Lilith’s Brood”.

“I was on the wrong side of the statistics. Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned,” she says.īut while in prison, books are her salvation. The judge who sends her away to a Minnesota jail is shocked by her crime Tookie, however, is not surprised by his harshness. Her friend Danae’s lover Budgie has died in the arms of his ex, Mara Danae persuades Tookie to steal a delivery truck in order to snatch Budgie’s body back. It’s 2005, and though Tookie is in her 30s, “I still clung to a teenager’s pursuits and mental habits” – drinking and drugging as though she is still an impulsive young adult. ReviewĪs Louise Erdrich’s new novel begins, her heroine, Tookie, has been sentenced to 60 years in prison for an offence both horrible and ridiculous. Her most recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood.

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