Book Summary and Reviews of This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

This Tender Land

A Novel

by William Kent Krueger

  • Readers' Rating (4):
  • Published:
  • Sep 2019, 464 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

For fans of Before We Were Yours and Where the Crawdads Sing, a magnificent novel about four orphans on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression, from the New York Times bestselling author of Ordinary Grace.

1932, Minnesota—the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, 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 unforgettable summer, these four orphans will 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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Though overly sentimental prose ("With every turn of the river, we were changing, becoming different people, and for the first time I understood that the journey we were on wasn't about getting to St. Louis") weakens the story's impact, Krueger's enjoyable riff on The Odyssey will satisfy fans of American heartland epics." - Publishers Weekly

This information about This Tender Land was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

William Kent Krueger Author Biography

Photo: Paul Dinndorf

William Kent Krueger is the award-winning author of a dozen Cork O'Connor novels, including Northwest Angle and Trickster's Point, as well as the novel Ordinary Grace. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family.

Link to William Kent Krueger's Website

Name Pronunciation
William Kent Krueger: kru-ger

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