William Kent Krueger’s novel This Tender Land is a new release in historical fiction, appearing in September of 2019. To see my other recent reviews in historical fiction, please see:
The Impossible Girl, by Lydia Kan
The da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
The plot of This Tender Land gets off to a good start. It’s 1932, the heart of the Great Depression. Three young men and a little girl, Emma, leave the Indian boarding school in Minnesota where they live. Only one of the boys is Native American, however, the other two are brothers, and the younger brother, Odie O’Banion, narrates the story. They leave because the boarding school is a horrible place to be, a callous institution of brutality, illegal activity, and the destruction of the culture of its Native American students. All very believable for a 1930s Indian boarding school.
When the little girl’s mother is killed by a tornado (I don’t know that Minnesota is prime tornado territory, but I let it slide for the sake of the plot) the boys decide to flee the boarding school and take Emma with them, so she won’t have to live with the Black Witch, the woman who runs the boarding school. So, they take off downriver in a canoe, hoping they’ll get to St. Louis where Odie’s Aunt Julia lives.
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The Minnesota River features in This Tender Land. From Wikipedia user Andercee.
Have I Read This Tender Land Before?
Yeah, there is a little bit of Huckleberry Finn in This Tender Land. The author admitted he was thinking about a reworking of that story when he wrote this one. But this story stands on its own and isn’t too derivative.
However, that’s about the last thing I’ll write in defense of the book. This surprised me because the book has a heavy majority of good reviews, but I didn’t find it well done. Nearly every character the kids meet along their journey is one of two things—a trusted ally or a threat. How binary. And, like a certain recent Star Wars movie, the kids meet the same people again and again on their route. Recycling villains in the same book? I didn’t care for that. Or for the lesbian scene with two women in St. Paul. I’m not trying to comment on modern culture wars here, but this event played no role in the story other than just being there, like the author was trying to check a box to appeal to modern diversity but didn’t know what to do with this idea after checking the box.
This Tender Land had more plot issues. The author did a reasonable job of giving the reader an idea what 1930s America felt like. This gets tarnished, however, by what we learn about Emma, the young girl who loses her mother. She has magical powers. Yeah, magic. She can influence the future and change it. But only on small, minor matters. Magic in 1930s America?
With a title like This Tender Land, one might think nature would play a big role in the book. That’s not really the case, despite a few scenes where characters wax rhapsodic about the land, and the tornado. The end just didn’t hook me, either. It had a lot of surprises that I suppose were meant to be riveting plot twists, but they all happen in about two chapters and suffered from the issues mentioned above, i.e., bringing back the old villains.
Not Finished Yet
Saving the most disappointing for last. The narrator, Odie, is twelve. He does not always talk or think like a twelve-year-old, however. (Which is, I admit, a hard character to use as your narrator. Trust me, I’d know. My first two novels, My Australian Adventure and The World Traveler, also have a narrator that age. I’m not saying I pulled it off perfectly, either, but Clarence Duval at least narrates like a kid most of the time.)
In fact, Odie often offers very adult observations, which the author tries to get away with by inserting an older Odie looking back afterward into what is otherwise a present-time narration. I don’t know if authors can really “cheat” when writing, but I’m calling shenanigans on this. If Odie were even 16 or 17, I might let it slide when he makes profound observations about human nature, but not at 12.
So, this adds up to a 4 out of 10 score for me. I might’ve gone 5 if I were feeling generous. The writing itself was fine, the historical description solid, and some of the minor characters believable, but the whole story rubbed me wrong in a bunch of ways.
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