This Tender Land
William Kent Krueger's This Tender Land, published in 2019, is a sweeping historical novel set across the Depression-era Midwest and a moving companion to Krueger's beloved Ordinary Grace. Odie O'Banion is twelve years old, an irrepressible Irish orphan stranded with his older brother Albert at the Lincoln Indian Training School in southwestern Minnesota, an institution intended for Native children that has, through bureaucratic indifference, been allowed to take in two white boys as well. The Lincoln School is run by the Brickmans, whose cruelty Krueger refuses to soften. After a violence neither boy can explain away, Odie and Albert flee in a stolen canoe, taking with them their mute Sioux friend Mose and a young girl named Emmy whose mother has just died. Their summer becomes a Mississippi River odyssey across a country flattened by hunger and the early Depression. Hobo camps, faith healers, sharecropping families, and a string of unforgettable strangers all leave their mark on the four travelers. Krueger writes in a register pitched somewhere between Mark Twain and John Steinbeck, with a deep tenderness for the people the New Deal did not reach. This Tender Land is one of the great American river novels of the twenty-first century.
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In the summer of 1932, four orphans run from the Lincoln Indian Training School in southern Minnesota in a stolen canoe down the Gilead River. The narrator is twelve-year-old Odie O'Banion, with his older brother Albert, a mute Sioux boy named Mose, and a small girl named Emmy bound for St. Louis.
No. This Tender Land (2019) is a standalone, separate from William Kent Krueger's Ordinary Grace and his Cork O'Connor mystery series. Each works on its own.
This Tender Land is fictional but built around documented Depression-era conditions in the U.S. Midwest, including Indian boarding schools and Hooverville migrant camps. William Kent Krueger researched the period extensively.
This Tender Land was written by William Kent Krueger, published in 2016 by Atria Books.
This Tender Land is 464 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, This Tender Land takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
This Tender Land is a standalone novel by William Kent Krueger, not part of a series.
This Tender Land is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
