This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

 

My plan for a weekend-long Reading Project were torn asunder by a complete crash of my circadian rhythm this morning, so I wasn't able to start at the coffee shop--I wasn't doing much of anything until basically noon--and I figured this would be a good book to read this evening. It's not part of Krueger's mystery series, it's a stand-alone novel which has obvious (and acknowledged in the afterword/acknowledgments) roots in *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*, among other novels, set in the Great Depression and connecting to the USA's mistreatment of the Native Americans, especially the Indian Schools ("Destroy the Indian, save the man.") and sending a foursome downriver from Minnesota to Saint Louis. There are strong hints of the supernatural in this novel, one of Krueger's near-constants, one character can apparently see the past, and one can apparently see (and possibly even change) the future; oddly, those little bits of the fantastic make the realism elsewhere in the novel grab a bit harder, the tension seems to give the novel some extra grit. The authorial voice is someone explicitly telling a story of his youth (not Krueger, he's not that old, but maybe someone his dad's age) and the power of story and the power of music are among the themes, here. Neat stuff, well worth reading.