Set during the summer of 1932, This Tender Land is a story that embraces tragedy and cruelty, kindness and love, murder and salvation. Most of all, it is about hope. Hope that we can find home, hope that we will find love, hope that life offers more than terror and injustice and cruelty. Hope that we can forgive and be forgiven.
This mythic story is a combination of Huckleberry Finn for its river journey and episodic adventures, with characters and events encountered from The Odyssey, and the darkness of The Night of the Hunter with children under threat fleeing downriver. And it recalls to mind the Book of Job as Odie grapples with the nature of God.
In 1932 Minnesota, orphaned brothers Albert and Odie are sent by their aunt to a Native American school, where she believes they are being well taken care of. The Brickmans run the school, siphoning off funds for themselves and allowing cruelty and abuse to reign. The boys befriend the mute Native American boy Mose. Albert and Mose are hard workers, but Odie rebels and is often punished. They have a friend in the teacher Voght, and the kind, widowed music teacher who offers to take the boys into her home to help run her farm. But a tornado takes her life, leaving her daughter Emmy in the hands of the cruel school headmistress.
The 'tornado god' wrecks more disaster in Odie's life, leading to an accidental death. The children together flee down the Mississippi River in a canoe, pursued by the headmistress of the school and the police who believes the girl Emmy was kidnapped.
William Kent Krueger writes, "I love this book every bit as much as I loved Ordinary Grace," and that offering this book he is "offering his heart." I, too, loved it every bit as Ordinary Grace, if not more.
It's a big 400-page book, engrossing and beautiful and heartbreaking. There is a lot of 'God talk' between Odie and the people he met who help him understand the timeless problem of why God allows evil in this world.
I was given access to a free egalley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Read my review of Ordinary Grace here.
by William Kent Krueger
Atria Books
Publication September 3, 2019
hardcover $27.99
ISBN13: 9781476749297
