Take your time with This Tender Land

Before I start in on my teaser, did you see that I released a new book this weekend? Check out Without Foresight and some other new releases on last week’s blog post. Without Foresight is book #12 in the Reg Rawlins Psychic Investigator series, but can be read as a stand alone.

Things were already bad enough for Reg Rawlins, Psychic Investigator. As if being the target of bigotry and hate crimes wasn’t enough, she fears she may finally be losing her grip on her own sanity.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

This is my second read by William Kent Krueger. The first was Iron Lake, a story in the Cork O’Connor series.

This Tender Land is not part of the Cork O’Connor series. It is an epic travel-across-the-country-during-the-depression story, with four orphans escaping a residential school and trying to get themselves somewhere safe. I see a few reviewers complaining that it is a children’s story, but it certainly is not. It isn’t a mystery like the Cork O’Connor series. Teens and other YA readers who enjoyed Hatchet, The Journey of Natty Gann, of Huck Finn might enjoy it, but it is not for the very young.

Krueger does a great job of portraying setting, both time and place, and it feels quite real. The narrating character is likable and relatable, and you both sympathize and admire these children who are trying to find themselves a better future. I am only halfway through at this point, but would highly recommend it.

“My Clyde is nothing if not softhearted,” Mrs. Brickman said. “A failing, I fear, when dealing with children who need to be guided with a strong hand.”

William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota’s Gilead River, Odie O’Banion is an orphan confined to the Lincoln Indian Training School, a pitiless place where his lively nature earns him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime, he and his brother, Albert, their best friend, Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.

Over the course of one summer, these four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.

Originally blogged at pdworkman.com