Along the way, they are held captive by a mad farmer who treats them as quasi family and indentured servants, visit homeless camps and meet train-hopping hobos. (Atria via AP)Įxcept for the naive Emmy, the children have learned not to trust adults and, for the most part, that is reinforced on the trip. “This Tender Land,” a novel by William Kent Krueger. Emmy’s mother and an ethical janitor are the only adults at the school who are kind to all the children. Their closest friends are Mose, a teenage Sioux whose tongue was cut off when he was a child, and Emmy, a bright little girl whose mother is a teacher at the school. The brothers stand out as the only white children among the Native Americans at the school, where Odie is the rebel while Albert tries to go by the rules. “This Tender Land” opens in 1932 when narrator Odysseus “Odie” O’Banion and his brother Albert endure a constant barrage of brutal treatment at the Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota, where they were sent after their bootlegger father was murdered. Strands of the adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on the Mississippi River echo throughout William Kent Krueger’s lyrical, compassionate “This Tender Land,” in which four children try to escape their brutal life by taking a canoe down the Mississippi River.īest known for his series about private investigator Cork O’Connor, Krueger delves deep into his second stand-alone novel for an affecting story about growing up and overcoming a childhood filled with neglect, abuse and racism during the Depression.
“This Tender Land’ by William Kent Krueger.
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