by William Kent Krueger ★★★☆☆
Even though he's written dozens of books, I'm late to the game on William Kent Krueger. The first novel of his I read was earlier this year, when I finally got around to hearing enough positive buzz about Ordinary Grace to add it to my reading list. And boy was I glad I did: it was, at one point, my top read of 2023 (albeit early in the year). So when I saw more good buzz about This Tender Land, plus multiple comparisons to Where the Crawdads Sing (my #1 book of 2018), I was excited to give it a try.
Perhaps it was inflated expectations, or my frame of mind, or a dozen other reasons, but This Tender Land didn't capture the same magic for me as Ordinary Grace. Krueger takes a similar approach as he did in the other book by once again establishing our narrator as an older man recounting a story from decades prior during his adolescence. In this case, it's Odie O'Banion, a 12-year-old orphan who lives with his brother Albert at the Lincoln Indian Training School, an orphanage/school/boarding home for, as the name implies, primarily Native American boys and girls who were torn away from their families. While neither Odie nor Albert are Native American, they found themselves at the school, via circumstances that aren't entirely clear to them.
Odie is a bit of a rebel and has landed on the bad side of headmistress Mrs. Brickman, unaffectionately referred to as the "Black Witch" by the students. His brother Albert, four years older, is a rules-follower and one of the more respected boys in the school. Without giving too much away, a series of events transpire and the boys find themselves fleeing the school in a canoe with their friend Mose, a mute Native American student, and the 6-year-old daughter of one of the school's teachers.
Their adventure takes them down the river and intertwines their lives with a number of characters, both good and bad, while they live with the constant threat of capture by the Black Witch. Some events very intentionally mirror The Odyssey, most notably their run-in with the "one-eyed pig-scarer" (any time you see someone with one eye, it's probably a reference to Polyphemus) and Odie's true desire revealed as "the only thing you've ever wanted was home". The nature of a tale centered around a river journey that connects the protagonists to a series of different characters of course has parallels to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well, which is how Krueger originally envisioned the story, with a Native American boy replacing Twain's character Jim.
So why didn't it work? Where I think Krueger nailed the right tone with Frank in Ordinary Grace as he teetered between a boy and the man he'd become, that same precision seemed to be missing from Odie O'Banion for me. Odie's reactions to a variety of things, from his first kiss to his first murder, just felt wrong. The novel felt a bit convoluted in terms of what it wanted to be as well. Is it a coming-of-age story? Is it a modern retelling of Huck Finn or The Odyssey? Is it a vehicle to provide social commentary on poor treatment of Native Americans? Krueger would probably say "all of the above", but I think it tried to be too many things and in doing so didn't fully succeed in any of them. In doing a little research on the book, I came to learn that it was originally written as a companion novel to Ordinary Grace, but that it was pulled at the last minute and significant revisions were made over the course of the following four years. I suspect that contributed mightily to some of the thematic disjointedness that I felt while reading it.
There are some bright spots; this is not a horrible book by any stretch. From a plotting standpoint, I appreciated the way that Krueger connects some dots and rounds out the story in the end. Unfortunately, by the time I got to that point I'd mostly lost interest. I just never fully connected with the characters in this one, and I stopped caring too early on.
Lots of people love this book; my ho-hum reaction to it is in the minority so this might be more on me than on the quality of the story or writing. However, I can say with confidence that Ordinary Grace is a better book across the board. Read that one first if you're new to William Kent Krueger, and if you give This Tender Land a try, significantly temper your expectations. It might just help you enjoy it more than I did.