On the run, they keep a low profile, ditch the canoe in the weeds, make forays into town for food.īut they are still children, and when they find temporary shelter along the way with kind women - Sister Eve of the Sword of Gideon Healing Crusade, an oracle-like figure who can see into their souls, or Gertie and Flo, who feed them and give them jobs, or Mother Beal, who shares what little food she has - we feel their wounds begin to heal and their cynicism begin to fall away. The four vagabonds, having barely escaped a farmer who has imprisoned them, become savvy about drunks and bootleggers, wary of hobos and scammers. Always there is danger always there is the threat of capture. We see poisonous snakes and tent revivals, manhunts, bread lines, soup kitchens. We see Hoovervilles and shantytowns, farmlands and meandering rivers, rocky bluffs and flooded river flats. We see the cruelty and abuse of Indian boarding schools. Part “Grapes of Wrath,” part “Huckleberry Finn,” Krueger’s novel is a journey over inner and outer terrain toward wisdom and freedom. This is a picaresque tale of adventure during the Great Depression. What propels them onward is an accusation of murder and kidnapping. What lies behind them is a life of cruelty and abuse. What lies before them is the slim hope of a home in St. Together these waifs form a desperate and easy-to-cheer-for family as they push off into the Gilead en route to the Mississippi.

The four travelers include Odie, our narrator, a boy who like Homer has a talent for storytelling and music his older brother Albert, whose mechanical skills get them out of many a jam Mose, a Sioux teen suffering transgenerational trauma from horrors inflicted upon his people and Emmy, a curly-headed 5-year old whose mother, one of the school’s few kind teachers, has just been killed by a tornado. Their odyssey is epic and, like Homer’s original, by turns gritty and divine. In William Kent Krueger’s latest novel, four orphaned children escape an American Indian boarding school in 1932 and canoe down the Mississippi seeking a home.

This tender land william kent krueger