Allie Levy owns and runs Still North Books & Bar in Hanover.

As the holiday shopping season kicks into gear, I often find myself with little time to pick up a book. As I pondered what to recommend for this feature (my favorite book of the year, Klara and the Sun? The most recent book I finished way back in October?!), I came across a social media post from a trusted source urging anyone who might come across it to pick up Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence. And while I am only halfway through the book, I am so glad I listened.

The novel follows Tookie, who finds herself working at a bookstore after years of incarceration. Soon after she begins working there, the bookstore’s most annoying customer passes away but sticks around to haunt the shop’s shelves. (If anyone tells you their bookstore doesn’t have a ghost, they are lying). As Tookie attempts to make sense of this haunting, the events of perhaps the most collectively traumatizing year in recent memory, 2020, begin to unfold.

The Sentence is a healing book. Rather than letting the wounds of the past two years fester, Erdrich writes her sentences with such beauty and wit that they act as a salve, offering a chance for the reader to process the grief, upheaval, and reckoning we have all just experienced. Just as this novel has cured my reading slump, I hope readers will find some light in the dark among these pages.

Previous Enthusiasms:

• Carin Pratt on Ash Davidson's Damnation Spring
• Peter Orner on Shirley Hazzard's The Evening of the Holiday
• Rena Mosteirin on Sybille Bedford's A Legacy
• Allie Levy on Chris Bohjalian's Hour of the Witch
• Jared Jenisch on Marc Hamer's Seed to Dust
• Kari Meutsch on All of Us Villains, by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman
• Carin Pratt on Stanley Tucci's Taste: My Life Through Food
• Peter Orner on poet Ruth Stone
• Rena Mosteirin on Little Women