Tookie is recently out of prison for transporting a corpse across state lines, which would have netted her $26,000 had she not been ratted out and had the body not had crack cocaine duct-taped to its armpits, a mere technicality of which Tookie was unaware. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day 2019 with a book splayed next to her-she didn't have time to put a bookmark in it-but she continues shuffling through the store’s aisles even after her cremation. Flora appears at the store one day with a photo of her great-grandmother, claiming the woman was ashamed of being Indian: “The picture of the woman looked Indianesque, or she might have just been in a bad mood,” Tookie decides. The most recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction-for The Night Watchman (2020)-turns her eye to various kinds of hauntings, all of which feel quite real to the affected characters.Įrdrich is the owner of Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis and, in this often funny novel, the favorite bookstore of Flora, one of narrator Tookie’s “most annoying customers.” Flora wants to be thought of as Indigenous, a “very persistent wannabe” in the assessment of Tookie, who's Ojibwe.
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