So here's the thing — everyone told me this was a ghost story, and I went in expecting spooky bookstore vibes, maybe some cozy supernatural romance energy. What I got instead was Louise Erdrich ripping open the year 2020 like a wound that hasn't scabbed over yet, and I sat at my desk with a half-finished logo mockup, mascara pooling under my eyes, while Frida stared at me from the printer like I'd lost my mind.
I kind of had.
A Ghost Story Where the Living Haunt You More
Flora is the ghost, sure — the bookstore's most insufferable customer who dies on All Souls' Day and refuses to leave. And yeah, that's funny and weird and Erdrich leans into the dark comedy of it. But the real haunting here is Tookie's life pressing in from every direction. This woman survived prison by reading "with murderous attention" (a phrase that literally made me set down my stylus and just sit with it for a minute), and now she's selling books in a Minneapolis indie shop while the world outside catches fire. The pandemic rolls in. George Floyd is murdered blocks away. And Tookie is trying to figure out what she owes — to the dead customer who won't leave, to her complicated marriage with Pollux, to a city in grief, to herself.
The bookstore sections feel so intimate and specific that I kept forgetting this was fiction. That same quiet intimacy around chosen family and the places that hold people together pulled me through We Are the Brennans in a single sitting, though that one trades the bookstore for a bar and the ghosts are strictly metaphorical. The way Tookie talks about books, the way customers orbit the shop, the little rituals of retail — it reminded me of every weird, beautiful small business I've ever loved. Erdrich owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, and you can feel her fingerprints on every shelf description.
But then the narrative meanders. And I mean meanders. There are stretches where Flora's ghost story takes a backseat to Tookie's extended family dynamics, to historical asides about Indigenous history that are important but sometimes feel like they're from a different book entirely. I didn't mind — I'm someone who reads for emotional texture, not plot efficiency — but if you need tight structure, this will drive you up the wall.
Erdrich Reading Erdrich: Intimate or Uneven?
Okay, the narration. This is where I have to be honest, because I've seen people say Erdrich "had no business narrating this" and I've seen people call her fabulous, and the truth is somewhere deeply personal.
Her voice is breathy and quiet. Not Julia Whelan warm-hug energy — more like sitting across from someone at a kitchen table at midnight while they tell you something they've been carrying for years. There's a wry, almost secretive humor in how she delivers Tookie's observations — the way she'll land a joke about Flora's ghost moving books around the store, just this dry little exhale that made me snort-laugh while designing a wedding invitation suite. The irony of that timing was not lost on me.
But the cadence does get uneven. There are moments where the rhythm drops out, where sentences that should hit hard land a little flat because the pacing doesn't quite build to them. It's the difference between a professional narrator who constructs emotion beat by beat and an author who knows what she meant but doesn't always transmit it through vocal performance alone. I caught myself rewinding a few times, not because I was confused but because I felt like I'd missed the emotional peak of a passage.
At 1.0x speed — my non-negotiable — this worked more often than it didn't. Her delivery during the pandemic sections, the isolation, the protests? Genuinely moving. There's a quiet devastation in how she reads those passages that a hired narrator might have oversold. Erdrich undersells, which is its own kind of power, even when it occasionally tips into monotone.
Who This Book Is Really For
If you want a tight ghost story with a clean resolution — skip this. If you need a romance that builds and pays off — this isn't that, though Tookie and Pollux's marriage is messy and real and sometimes tender in ways that caught me off guard. If you're someone who reads to feel the texture of a specific time and place, who wants to sit inside 2020 Minneapolis with a woman who's survived worse and is just trying to hold steady — this book felt like pressing your hand against cold glass and feeling the warmth of someone's palm on the other side.
Abuela would have had opinions about the ghost. She would've told me Flora deserved to be haunted right back. She would've understood Tookie's stubbornness, her refusal to be small. My heart.
I cried twice. Once during the protests. Once near the end, when Tookie talks about what books actually do for people — not as metaphor, but as lifeline. That one wrecked me at 11 PM on a Tuesday with Diego asleep on my lap and a deadline I absolutely did not meet.
Leave It on the Shelf or Take It Home?
This is a rainy Sunday book. Not because it's cozy — it isn't, really — but because it needs your full attention and your willingness to wander. The author-narration is a gamble that mostly pays off if you let it. It's imperfect and human and sometimes frustrating, which is honestly what the book is about anyway.
