This Tender Land (2019) is a sprawling stand alone book, something similar to William Kent Krueger’s most acclaimed book ➙ Ordinary Grace.

It tracks the adventures of 12-year-old Odysseus “Odie” O’Bannion, his older brother Albert, and two of their friends after they flee the brutality of the (fictional) Lincoln residential Indian School, and travel by canoe down the (fictional) Gilead, Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers in hopes of reuniting with their aunt in St. Louis.

It reminds some of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Odyssey.

Krueger says he drew inspiration from Charles Dickens‘s criticism of the severe British boarding school system.

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