I don’t mean they weren’t interested in me.

She does admit, “I was mostly a conversational receptacle for my parents. That would be a familiar story plenty of writers have penned such complaints. Perhaps she didn’t get enough love in childhood. Imagine a character who can’t profess her love how do things change if you show the one moment she can?Īt first, it might sound like McCracken is talking about her mother. Arguing with yourself or the dead will get you nowhere. If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else.

To tell the truth about her mother, McCracken insists on calling it a novel and says that she has invented small details, though page by page the pretense seems to fall apart. It sure reads like a memoir, although she keeps telling us that it is not one-that her mother distrusted such books, especially when written about family members. So now we have The Hero of This Book, a tricky memoir-or-novel about the loss of her mother. Among the recurring themes are lost children, old lore, antiquated talk, vanished places, things one no longer finds in Massachusetts (where she no longer lives), and-perhaps related to these-a kind of spiritual curiosity, even though she has confessed, “My religion is worry.” Why does a boy grow so large that his body fails him? Why does a child die? These are spiritual questions that she meets with just enough humor to carry us from one grave-rubbed page to the next. Each bears some relation to her own life. Lately she has been picking up the pace, publishing four books in the last eight years. ( From the publisher.Read our latest issue or browse back issues. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.

Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.

It is also home to an orphan named Odie O’Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Minnesota-the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. A magnificent novel about four orphans on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression, from the bestselling author of Ordinary Grace.

This tender land a novel