THIS TENDER LAND by William Kent Krueger

 

 When Mr. Krueger appeared on a zoom interview last month I had never heard of him.  He cast himself as a “storyteller” and this 2019 novel is all of that and more. It is set in 1932 and gets its historical grounding from a host of atmospheric detail about the great depression, prohibition, and the persecution of native Americans.

The narrator is an older man who speaks through his twelve-year self. Odie and his slightly older brother, Albert, are the only two white boys at a Native American school where they are fed little, worked hard, and punished for any infraction. When Odie commits a serious crime, the two boys decide to flee. They are joined by a native American friend, Mose (who is physically strong but mute), and a little orphan girl named Emmy. Each of the four are alike in their search for some kind of anchor or home within a tender land that seems to change from bountiful to indiscriminately cruel with tornadic fury. 

The youngsters travel a sequence of rivers in a canoe with the goal of reaching a relative of Odie’s and Albert’s in St. Louis. The water journey takes on symbolic overtones by drawing on elements of both Mark Twain and Homer.  At each stop on their trek the vagabonds meet new friends or new enemies. And always the long arm of the law is never far behind. There are joyful sections when the group meets Sister Eve and her revivalist crusade or a remarkable Hooverville family with a young daughter, but the frightening sections are full of tension and violence.  Even though hope is always around the corner, I guarantee you that the twists at the end will keep you in surprise mode.  

 Although Kreuger is a plotter not a plodder, I would be remiss in not mentioning his evocative prose.  From a number of examples this one will suffice. “The sun, which was the color of a blood orange, hung nailed above the horizon, and long bars of red light came through the gaps in the old barn walls and lay on the brown dirt floor like little streams of hot lava.”

 Krueger lives in Minnesota and has also written a series of detective novels featuring a retired sheriff named Cork O’connor. I am going to check out one of those next. I give this stand-alone a strong 4.5 out of 5.   

 

Book Review THE BOOKSHOP OF YESTERDAYS

 

According to the book jacket, Amy Meyerson teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California and her debut novel, The Bookshop of Yesterdays, is an auspicious one. If you aren’t a lover of bookstores, reading, and the theatre, you may not be as positive as I am, but this combination is a triple threat plus for anyone who is.  

 The main character is Miranda Brooks, who was named after Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  A passing familiarity with the play will deepen your experience with the book. The novel’s Miranda grows up on the west coast and then moves to the east coast. She teaches history at a private middle school and lives with a young gym teacher from the same school.  Her name seems to originate from an early close relationship with her uncle Billy, who owned a bookstore in Los Angeles called Prospero Books. He would often take the young Miranda there and gave her a love of books and reading. One of his teaching tools was to create complicated  literary scavenger hunts for her amusement. 

 

When Miranda was twelve years old, her mother and her uncle Billy had a strange falling out and Billy disappears from the young girl’s life. Sixteen years pass and then Uncle Billy dies and bequeaths Prospero Books to her. Miranda returns to the west coast for Billy’s funeral and discovers she has inherited a failing bookstore (What Indie is not on the verge of failing?) and a complicated literary scavenger hunt put together by her long absent uncle. From here on the book concentrates on Miranda’s attempts to save the bookstore from bankruptcy while trying to re-find a relationship with her mother, find a new life for herself, and unravel her uncle’s mysterious connection to her.

 

The clues are buried mostly in a group of classic novels. At one time or another you will join Miranda in searching the pages of Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Fear of Flying, and The Grapes of Wrath, to mention just a few. I picked up the solution to the mystery early on, but the enjoyment of the search itself kept me going. I’m even going to make a guess that the author may have planned for that to happen so that we could also enjoy the pearls of wisdom dropped along the way. Early on, one of Billy’s cryptic notes says, “Understanding prepares us for the future. Remember that. It’s the only way to make us safer.” Another early item had an even greater impact on me. I am currently engaged in writing a family history and dealing with some uncomfortable times. Miranda states firmly in the early pages that “Every family has its unspoken stories. Billy was ours.”  Toward the end I also loved a part when Miranda is recalling what her father once said about baseball. As you settle into the batter’s box you have to look the pitcher in the eye. This tells him you aren’t afraid. “Baseball is like the rest of life . . . You have to decide how you want to be.” She might also have said that most of life is a search.

 

You can read The Bookshop of Yesterdays as a coming of age story, a romance, a mystery, a loving literary feast, or maybe all of the above. I give it a 4.5 of five and encourage Ms. Meyerson to keep writing.