"This unnamed bookstore closely resembles a Minneapolis bookstore owned by Erdrich, not least because its owner, Louise, is a writer setting off on a book tour just as the pandemic is taking hold, at about the same time that Erdrich would've been promoting her last novel, 'The Night Watchman',  winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize.

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The nature of the bookstore and its largely Native staff attract a certain sort of customer, the Indian-curious and wannabe; one of the most egregious of these, Tookie's "most annoying favorite customer," is Flora, who claimed to have an Indian great-grandmother and has recently died with, as her foster daughter explains, 'this book splayed open beside her ... implying she'd not had time to use a bookmark.'

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This book, an antique bound journal titled 'The Sentence: An Indian Captivity 1862-1883,' comes into Tookie's hands and proceeds to haunt her almost as vigorously as does Flora's persistent and aggressive ghost. Why this is, and what it has to do with Tookie's own troubled life history and identity, is what 'The Sentence' is mostly about, though what constitutes an identity in general and in particular is the larger question threaded through the novel. 'I really believe that to live inauthentically is to live in a sort of hell,' one of Tookie's co-workers says — but determining what's authentic can be somewhat hellish, too, it seems."