One to Watch

In a previous entry I mentioned a Western I read a while back that I loved and since I'm passing it on I thought I ought to expand on that. (I usually don't keep books, unlike some in the biz I am not a bibliophile. Most of the time I just want to read it, I don't need to keep it. I'm proud to say my library card is almost as active as my debit card.)

To say Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves is a Western might not be entirely accurate, can Canadians have Westerns? To qualify as a Western must a book be set in the US? I'm not sure and I don't have the genre rulebook handy so we'll say it's a Canadian frontier story set in a small village called Dove River in 1867. When a man is murdered and the boy who was his protege disappears no one in the village remains untouched. Penney examines the ripple effect on these people in leisurely, almost poetic detail. When the body is discovered:

"I don't pretend to be particularly brave and, in fact, long ago gave up the notion that I have any remarkable qualities, but I am surprised at the calmness with which I look around the cabin. Mt first thought is that Jammet has destroyed himself, but Jammet's hands are empty, and there is no sign of a weapong near him. One hand dangles off the bed. It does not occur to me to be afraid. I know with absolute certainty that whoever did this is nowhere near-the cabin proclaims its emptiness. Even the body on the bed is empty. There are no attributes to it now-the cheerfulness and slovenliness and skill at shooting, the generosity and callousness-they have all gone."

So poetic in fact that the reader doesn't realize how much the suspense is building as the boy's mother travels hundreds of miles in the desolate wilderness to find her son until the search is over and the tension is broken. Penney, a filmmaker by trade, won the Costa (formerly known as the Whitbread) Award for this book, her first. Hopefully, that positive reinforcement will mean more from her in the future.

The Tenderness of Wolves will be published in the US in July 2007.