This Tender Land

I picked up This Tender Land because a friend kept pressing it on me with the same line, that it reads like Huckleberry Finn set in the Depression. That comparison is doing a lot of work, and the book knows it. What kept me reading was not the pitch but the narrator. Odie O'Banion tells the whole story as an old man looking back at the summer of 1932, when he was twelve, and his voice has that particular mix of fondness and ache that older people get when they talk about the worst summer of their lives.

The edition most people will find was published in 2019 by Atria Books and runs 464 pages. It is a long book, and it earns its length in some stretches and wanders in others. I will walk through it in order, because the trip itself is the point, and I will say where it dragged for me.

The school on the Gilead

The Lincoln Indian Training School sits on the banks of a fictional Minnesota river called the Gilead. It used to be a military outpost, and it still feels like one. Hundreds of Native children live there, sent from their families to be schooled in English and kept under strict discipline. Punishment happens in a former solitary cell the staff calls the quiet room.

Odie and his older brother Albert are the only white boys in the place. Their mother died two years earlier. Their father died more recently, and with no room for them at the local orphanage they were placed at Lincoln. Albert is the steady one, good with his hands and good at arithmetic, the kind of older brother who takes the blame. Odie is the talker. He plays harmonica, makes up stories, and gets into trouble often enough that he knows the quiet room well.

The school is run by Clyde Brickman and his wife Thelma. The children call her the Black Witch, and Krueger does not soften her. She tells moral stories at dinner and then punishes any boy who questions them. Her husband is quieter but no kinder. Working for them is a groundskeeper named DiMarco, a man the boys fear for good reason.

Two adults offer some light. Cora Frost is a widowed neighbor who hires Lincoln children to help on her farm. She has a small daughter named Emmy, who is six and prone to strange spells where she seems to see things and speaks in ways she later forgets. Cora offers to take in Odie, Albert, and their best friend Mose, and for a short while that looks like a way out. Mose is a Sioux boy, big and gentle, who cannot speak because his tongue was cut out when he was very small. Odie and Albert learned sign language as children because their own mother was deaf, so they can talk with him when nobody else bothers to try.

Then a tornado comes through and destroys the Frost farm and kills Cora. This happens early, and it sets the tone for the whole novel. Hope appears, then the sky goes dark. Emmy is left with no one, and the Brickmans take her in. Odie finds a family photograph in the wreckage and carries it back to Emmy, and he is punished for the small kindness. From that point the school feels less like a bad place to wait and more like a trap.

One thing I appreciated here is that Krueger does not pretend the school is some equal opportunity orphanage. It exists to strip Native children of their language and family ties, and the white boys are almost incidental to it. That said, the Native children as a group stay mostly in the background, and I wished for more of their daily life instead of seeing nearly all of it through Odie. Mose gets real attention. Most of the others do not, and that imbalance bothered me more the further I read.

A crime and a canoe

The break comes at a quarry. DiMarco corners Odie there and admits to killing another boy named Billy Red Sleeve, then threatens Odie to keep him quiet. In the struggle Odie pulls DiMarco over the ledge, and the man dies. Whether you call it accident or self defense, Odie knows how it will look. A white orphan with a record of mischief against a dead staff member, in a school run by people who already dislike him. He tells Albert and Mose, and the three decide they have to run.

With help from an older German worker at the school named Volz, they take Emmy with them. Leaving a six year old with the Brickmans is unthinkable to them by this point. They also take money from the Brickmans safe, and in the safe they find letters. One set shows the Brickmans were skimming funds meant for the children. Another is from an aunt named Julia who lives in St. Louis. That letter becomes their destination. Down the Gilead to the Minnesota River, then to the Mississippi, then south to St. Louis and a relative who might take them in.

They leave in the Frosts canoe. Four children on a big river with stolen money, a gun taken from Mr. Brickman, and very little food. Odie keeps their spirits up the way he knows how, by telling serial stories about wanderers in trouble, and by playing his harmonica in the evenings. Emmy sleepwalks and has fits that frighten the boys, especially when her confused talk seems to point at danger ahead. Albert tries to keep everything practical. Mose keeps watch and does more than his share of the paddling.

This stretch moves well. The details feel right for 1932. They buy shoes and bread with the stolen cash and worry the whole time about being caught. News of the Brickmans reward reaches them through strangers. The letters they stole keep changing meaning as Odie rereads them. I liked that Krueger lets the plan be thin. These are children improvising, not adventurers with a map. The one criticism I would make is that the escape itself goes a little too smoothly in places. Adults who should ask questions do not, and the boys find help exactly when they need it. But the river carries you past those doubts if you let it.

Jack and the price of a shot

Their first real stop ends badly. A farmer with one eye, a scarred face, and a heavy drinking habit catches them sleeping in his shed and locks the boys in his barn. Odie privately calls him frightening names at first. The man goes by Jack, and he keeps Emmy in the farmhouse while he puts the boys to work on his neglected land.

What follows is one of the best parts of the book. Jack is a veteran of the First World War, sour and lonely, whose wife and daughter left him. Slowly, and without any big speech, he warms to having children around. The boys repair fences and clear fields. Emmy, who is small and easy to love, gets under his guard. For a few days it almost looks like another Cora Frost situation, a hard man softened by company and work.

Then whiskey undoes it. One night Jack turns on Emmy over something small, a dropped bottle, and his rage is sudden and physical. Odie has the Brickman gun. He fires and hits Jack in the chest. The children flee, certain they have left a dead man behind them.

I found this the hardest section to read and the most honest. Krueger does not let Odie off easy. The boy who tells jokes and stories has now killed one man and shot another, and he carries both events like stones in his pockets. Albert does not lecture him. Mose does not judge him in words. But Odie starts to believe he brings ruin to anyone who shelters him, and that belief shapes everything he does afterward. Some readers will find the shooting too quick, a confrontation built up and then discharged in a paragraph. I felt the speed was the point. Violence in this book arrives the way the tornado did, without a drumroll.

Sister Eve and the healing show

Downriver the children hear music and follow it to a tent settlement run by a traveling revival group called the Sword of Gideon Healing Crusade. Its leader is Sister Eve, a young woman with a striking gift for performance and, supposedly, for healing. She claims she can read a stranger past by holding their hand. During a service Odie and Emmy save her from a violent man in the crowd, and she takes the four children under her protection.

For a while this feels like shelter. The group feeds them. The musicians teach Odie tunes. Sister Eve is kind to Emmy and listens to Odie with real attention. Then Odie catches the group manager, a trumpet player named Sid, paying people after they are healed on stage. The miracles are seeded. Plants in the audience get up from wheelchairs and throw away crutches, and the collection plate fills.

Odie confronts Eve, and the scene that follows is painful in a good way. She does not deny it. She tells him she once had something real, or believes she did, and that Sid talked her into priming the crowd in each new town. Her argument is that the hope she sells heals people even when the cure is staged. Odie, who has watched hope fail at Lincoln and at the Frost farm, does not know what to do with that.

Before anyone can settle the argument, Emmy startles during the confrontation and accidentally lets loose a rattlesnake kept by Sid. The snake bites Albert. What comes next is a long night of waiting for medicine while Albert burns with fever and the camp prays and argues. The serum arrives in time and Albert lives, but newspaper coverage of the miraculous survival brings exactly the attention the children feared. The Brickmans are still looking, and now their faces are in print. They have to leave the crusade behind.

I admired this section more on reflection than while reading it. At the time I wanted the plot to move faster. Looking back, Eve is one of the few adults in the book who admits she is compromised and keeps going anyway. Her claims about Emmy are worth noting too. She begins to suspect the little girl fits and visions are not ordinary sickness but something that has repeatedly steered the group away from harm. The book never fully explains Emmy gift, and readers who need clear rules for such things will be frustrated. I came to accept the haze. In a story told by an old man about his childhood, some events stay strange.

Hopersville, Mankato, and the Flats

After the crusade the children hide on an island and find the bones of a Native child. The discovery hits Mose hard. He has carried his own wound quietly for years, and here is proof of how little his people's losses counted. From this point he asks to be called by his Sioux name, Amdacha, which carries a meaning tied to being broken to pieces. Papers they later see in a library connect his family name to the mass execution of Dakota men at Mankato in 1862. Krueger handles this history with care but at a distance. Mose grows surer of who he is, though not happier, and his friendship with Odie changes. That felt true to me. Boys who survive something together do not always stay the same boys.

Odie gets separated for a stretch and wanders into Mankato during a clash between police and protesting veterans of the Bonus Army. Frightened, he follows music again, which is his habit throughout the book, and finds a Hooverville, a settlement of jobless families living in shacks. The press calls such places Hopersville in bitter jest. There he meets the Schofields, a large family of Kansas farmers driven off their land by dust and debt, camped with a broken truck on their way to Chicago. Their daughter Maybeth is close to Odie age, and the two fall into the intense, chaste crush that only young teenagers can sustain. Odie gives the family money that Sister Eve had pressed on them, and Mr. Schofield, despite his drinking, uses it to get the truck running and the family back on the road.

There is a sweetness to these chapters that the book needs. People with nothing share food. Neighbors watch each other's children. Then police raid the settlement and beat residents while looking for troublemakers, and Odie once again mistakes a general cruelty for a hunt aimed at him. A Sioux man named Forrest, who has crossed their path before, finds Odie and leads him back to the others.

The group reaches St. Paul and stays with friends of Forrest named Gertie and Flo, who run a small restaurant in a working class neighborhood called the Flats. The Flats chapters show a city version of the Hooverville ethic. Neighbors of many backgrounds look after one another without making a project of it. Emmy is happy there. Albert finds work fixing a towboat engine and earns the respect of its owner. Mose considers staying. And Odie, unbelievably, comes face to face with Jack, the farmer he shot. The man lived, though barely, and has since reunited with his family. Their meeting is brief and restrained, and Krueger is wise not to turn it into a courtroom scene. Jack does not absolve Odie, exactly. He simply goes on living, which may be harder for Odie to accept.

Odie by now is convinced he is poison to the group. Everyone else is finding a place. He alone feels stuck with his guilt. So he slips away, hops a freight train, and heads for St. Louis by himself to find Aunt Julia. I understood the choice even as I disliked it. Twelve year old boys in stories run toward danger to spare others, and old men telling stories know it was foolish. Both things are true here.

St. Louis and what the river keeps

St. Louis disappoints Odie in stages. Aunt Julia's house is not what he pictured, and it takes him a while to admit what it is. She keeps a brothel. The men coming and going, the late hours, the money, all of it finally registers. Julia is kind to him but clear that her home is no place to raise a boy, let alone four children.

Wandering the city shantytown, Odie runs into Sister Eve and her people again. She urges him to go back to Julia, and she also tells him something about storytelling itself, that shaping events into a tale has a power of its own. When he returns, Julia tells him the truth she held back. She is not his aunt. She is his mother. She gave up Odie and Albert years earlier and has lived with that choice ever since.

Before anyone can absorb this, the Brickmans force their way in. Thelma Brickman has a history with Julia from years before, and old hatreds surface fast. It comes out that Thelma killed Odie father, a bootlegger, and that her pursuit of the children has mixed punishment with something more personal. She wants Emmy too, having heard talk of the girl's strange fits and hoping to use the child's gift. She shoots Odie in the leg. Julia grapples with her, and both women go through a window. Thelma dies. Julia survives but is badly hurt.

Albert, Mose, and Emmy arrive in time for the aftermath. Emmy has another fit on the road, and Odie comes to believe her episode somehow steadied Julia's hold on life. Whether you read that as miracle or coincidence will decide how you feel about the ending. Sister Eve stays with Julia. Clyde Brickman later goes to prison for his part in the school thefts. Albert eventually serves in the Second World War and does not come home. Mose, calling himself Amdacha, plays baseball under a nickname reporters give him and later works to change how Native children are schooled. Emmy grows up like a sister to Odie. And Odie, decades later, marries Maybeth Schofield, or so the old narrator tells his great grandchildren on the riverbank where the story began.

That frame matters. The whole novel is Odie as an old man telling a tale to children, admitting he polishes some parts. He closes with an image of God as a river running through time, carrying everyone along. Some readers will find that sentimental. I found it earned, though only just. After so much loss, the book insists that forgiveness is the hardest gift to give, and that stories are one way people practice it. The Brickmans are never excused. But Odie lets go of hating them, with Eve's help, and that release is presented as work rather than magic.

My fair criticisms, collected: the middle sags when the children move from one kind group to the next without enough change in between. Emmy powers stay vague in a way that will annoy literal minded readers. Native characters besides Mose deserve more page time in a book set at an Indian school. And the final revelations about Julia and Odie father arrive quickly after a slow journey. Still, the strengths outweigh those faults for me. The river trip has momentum. The Depression details, the Hooverville, the revival tent, the Flats, feel researched without showing the research. And Odie voice, funny and grieving by turns, holds the whole thing together. This is a big hearted adventure story that knows how much it cost the children to take the trip.