The Sentence (by Louise Erdrich)

Unbelievably, this is my first book by Louise Erdrich. And it's so good, I don't know what I was waiting for.  (I was about to say it is amazing on the sentence level and then realized that was a potentially confusing pun. But it is amazing on the sentence level nonetheless. As well as on other levels.)

This both qualifies as a RHC book (a book set in a bookstore) and is a contender for the Tournament of Books, so I saved two birds with one stone, as my child likes to say. I don't know how Erdrich somehow managed to write a novel about 2020 that feels correct. I feel like any other novelist would need some distance from the events of 2020 - Covid, George Floyd, Trump - before writing a novel about it all, and yet she manages to thread the needle perfectly, even with a novel set in Minneapolis that engages with those events directly. She has perspective, somehow, and the novel shines as a result. How is that even possible!?

Anyway please tell me which Erdrich is your favorite so I can add another book to my library wait list. And let me know how depressing it is on a scale of 1-10 so I can prepare myself.