His tongue had been cut out, so he could not speak as he got older. Mose is an Indian boy about Albert's age who was found as an infant in a ditch next to his dead mother. When disaster strikes and things become even more dangerous for the boys, they set off in a canoe, along with their best friend, Mose. She's been threatening to send Odie to reformatory school, so the brothers know they need to get out of there soon. Brickman, widely known to the students as the Black Witch, is cruel, and some of the adults she has hired are even worse. But regardless of behavior, Lincoln School is a frightening and dangerous place to grow up.

While Albert is a model citizen, Odie is always getting into trouble. Odie O'Banion is twelve in 1932, and his older brother, Albert, is sixteen. Though most residents at the school are Native American children (both orphaned and those sent to the school by well-meaning or desperate parents), there are two white brothers who have lived there since their parents died four years earlier. It's 1932, and a group of orphans are living in the Lincoln Indian Training School in southern Minnesota along the Gilead River. And though I missed our discussion, I think my book group agreed because this novel got one of our highest ratings ever (8.4 out of 10).

I loved every minute of it and never wanted it to end. This engrossing, warmhearted, suspenseful historical novel just blew me away. My own neighborhood book group then chose the novel as our April book. So, I was thrilled when our library system chose This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger as our All-County Reads selection for this spring. I've been hearing great things about William Kent Krueger's novels for years now, but I hadn't yet read one.

Reviews of this tender land