This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

I appreciated This Tender Land as a solid effort, but for me it often slipped into a slow, plodding pace that made it easy to lose the thread of the story. There are moments of beautiful, evocative writing, but the narrative frequently got bogged down, and at times seemed to lean on drama for the sake of drama rather than letting the story breathe. The loose ends left unexplored made the overall story feel less satisfying than it could have been. While I know this one received a lot of accolades, I couldn’t help but compare it to Ordinary Grace, which I found far more compelling, cohesive, and tremendously better.