Another guest review by Janelle Bailey, retired Literature teacher.

So, first: I absolutely loved Writers and Lovers, my introduction to Lily King’s writing, and then read The English Teacher, which I also loved, so then ordered copies of everything she has written. But I have been saving the others for when I NEED to read something I can trust, fully, will be “really good.”

And then when I saw that a brand new Lily King was coming out, I probably did not even pay attention to the finely printed “Stories” on its cover, maybe not even until after I had selected it for book club. Hmpf, no emojis allowed in these reviews, huh? Well…it would be useful to be able to easily insert, otherwise, a kind of Steve-Urkel-sounding “Did I do that?” otherwise.

This is to say that it has been my experience that it is a very, very rare author who is equally good, let alone equally tremendous, in multiple genres. And there is absolutely a difference between short stories and novels and, I think, that is the case for both their readers and their writers.

So the fault may be mine, I say, for having had of this collection of King’s short stories some promise to  leave me feeling like reading a King novel does. For I did still think, when I finally treated myself to diving in, “It’s Lily King! It will be amazing!”

Therefore, I don’t know whether it is because it is King writing short stories instead of a novel, or my expectations of King novels being imposed on these short stories, or my not reading them as they should have been read, or what, really, but: truly and simply, these did not do for this reader the same as King’s novels have.

They did not make me smile (frequently enough) at characters I fully understood, smacking a sentence or page in as many of those “I see you! I hear you!” and “You get me!” moments as I have with her novels. There were also not the rich and valuable allusions to great literature that have always enhanced my value for, added to my connection to her novels’ characters. And there simply wasn’t enough or wasn’t the “right stuff” to give me what I needed, albeit in short story form, to feel the value of spending the time with these characters and/or their stories…in quite the ways I expected to, since Lily King wrote them.

And this is true of my feelings of most of the stories contained within.

But it is not accurate for how much I truly enjoyed meeting Oda and Hanne in “North Sea,” for their  mother-daughter relationship. This story struck me on a number of levels and gave me a truly valuable short story experience.

And I also enjoyed aspects of “Timeline,” but truly that was due, mostly, to the crazy coincidence of its setting being Vermont and Lake Champlain, where I had just visited for the very first time, myself, last week.

I won’t be quitting King any time soon, though. Yes, I will pay closer attention to the fine print that lets me know whether I am picking up a novel by a novelist I value, a collection of short stories by a writer of short fiction whom I value, or anything written by those rare few who have been tried and truly do cross genres amazingly well.

But you…you may love this one, so don’t listen to me. Just read it yourself, and let me know what you think!

Guest review by Janelle Bailey, retired Literature teacher.

Wow. What an amazing, wonderful, relevant and timely, well-written book. And what a very different book for Louise Erdrich!

I have read many of her books and have always decided to read her when I was prepared to engage in either dark or Native American experience or dark, Native American experience…but almost always (minus one book!) able to trust that I’d be engaging with smart and really good writing and that I’d come out on the other end better for the experience and the time spent there. (Okay, that one book was Future Home of the Living God; maybe I just didn’t get it.)

But opening up The Sentence has taken me on a tremendous adventure and, I think, directly into Louise Erdrich herself. She even terms it, albeit in the voice and term of a different situation, “autofiction.” I get it! Autobiographical fiction…not memoir but a special blurring of autobiographical fact but spun as fiction. This is the first I’ve seen the term, but it is completely apt! And it gives me the means to re-see and talk anew about, say, Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies. I think that’s what that is, too.

So this is all to say that Louise Erdrich is a character in this novel…that is written by Louise Erdrich. And the bookstore that Louise Erdrich owns, Birchbark Books, located in St. Paul, Minnnesota, is both real and a specific setting in this novel. And I LOVE that I have been there multiple times, know it exactly as it is described here, have never seen Ms. Erdrich there herself, unfortunately, though I have absolutely entered the store with hope of that every single time. And I have eaten multiple brunches at the elegant and simple restaurant just two doors away that is also mentioned here, along with the school across the little busy road. So in all of these things, there is truth and reality and fact. And that is the case, also, with much that the book so relevantly for its contemporary and current setting of time also discusses: the pandemic, the shutting down of all things, the “abundance of caution” with which many of us proceed, the strange dismissal by so many of science and the horror of their choosing conspiracy and some strange idolatry over everyone else’s desire to do right by and for alllllll involved. Okay, in all honesty, those issues are actually presented more subtly and are more PC in the book than I feel them myself. Erdrich is so smart. The novel does have a thoughtful character assert that: “I really believe that to live inauthentically is to live in a sort of hell” (347).

This book is set in and addresses the realities, too, of George Floyd’s death and all that followed, police officers and that work as a reality and conundrum at the moment, including this novel’s main character’s husband being a former tribal officer and his grandmother’s warning him long ago to “Watch out…for when that uniform starts to wear you” (283). Wow.

Additionally, I am entangled in notes of all of the authors and books that are mentioned within this book, that wonderful thing happening when authors reference titles and authors known to the reader so engaged anew in the mind of the author and feeling that very special reading kismet as well as frantically wishing to also read and soon everything mentioned not already read or shared by the reader.

And there are so many other good things layered in this book–families and culture and tradition and love and heartbreak and most especially spirits–and which, if you read my reviews with any consistency, you know I never reveal all details thereof, for I never aim to spoil but to strongly encourage you, in this case, to also read the book…so that we can talk about it together and share our reading heads and reading hearts and build a community and a bridge to an even better way of living…together.

Read this one and soon. I do not think you will be disappointed.