About this title: In this brutal, epic debut novel, a man is found murdered and a 17-year-old boy is on the run. While vigilantes and rescue searchers head out to look for the fugitive, all the mother of the boy wants is her son back. She will do anything to see him home safe, even at the peril of her own life.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781416571308ISBN:1416571302
Description: Good. Good Condition. Reasonable wear-still very useable. Text appears free of marks, writing, and highlighting. May have bookstore-related stamps/stickers/marks. Multiple copies may be available. SHIPS W/IN 24 HOURS! FREE INSURANCE on all orders! E-mail notification! Careful, thorough packaging. Fast, personal service. No hassle, full refund return policy! COMBINE SHIPPING-TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER BOOKS/CDs/MOVIES AVAILABLE! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781416571308ISBN:1416571302
Description: Good. Good Condition. Reasonable wear. Still very usable. Clean, mark-free interior! Remainder mark on top page edges. Multiple copies may be available. SHIPS W/IN 24 HOURS! FREE INSURANCE on all orders! E-mail notification! Careful, thorough packaging. Fast, personal service. No hassle, full refund return policy! COMBINE SHIPPING-TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER BOOKS/CDs/MOVIES AVAILABLE! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781416571308ISBN:1416571302
Description: Acceptable. Fair Condition. Considerable wear, but still very useable. Text appears free of marks, writing, and highlighting. May have bookstore-related stamps/stickers/marks. Front cover has open cut on bottom right edge. Multiple copies may be available. SHIPS W/IN 24 HOURS! FREE INSURANCE on all orders! E-mail notification! Careful, thorough packaging. Fast, personal service. No hassle, full refund return policy! COMBINE SHIPPING-TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER BOOKS/CDs/MOVIES AVAILABLE! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781416540748ISBN:1416540741
Description: Good in Good jacket. First Edition. 318-Y-Add Ex-library. Books rated "Good" may have some notes, underlining, or highlighting. These books also may contain the previous owner's name, stamp, sticker, or gift inscription, or may be library discards. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Dust Cover Missing. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very good. Light wear to edges and pages. Cover and spine show no easily noticeable damage. A tradition of southern quality and service. All books guaranteed at the Atlanta Book Company. read more
"After struggling for what seems like half of my life to finish "The Tenderness of Wolves," I have just one question: Who is responsible for generating all the hype? I can understand Costa Coffee naming it 2006 book of the year in its book contest. After all, Costa needs to sell more coffee and anybody trying to read "Tenderness of Wolves" will need to drink it. But I can't fathom the five-star reviews.
On the surface, the book promises an intriguing female-driven historical detective tale offering crime buffs a break from the usual modern fare of serial killers and pistol packing female FBI agents. Beyond the promise of a wild west-style hunt for a killer led by the mother of a missing teen, however, "Tenderness" fails to deliver much more.
In her YouTube promo, Penney says she wanted landscape to be a large part of the story. In that sense, then, she succeeded. But I could make a long list of transgressions. A couple of subplots go nowhere and then simply vanish in the Canadian snow. Homosexuality emerges as a theme in another subplot without any good reason to address it.
More damaging, she introduces way too many characters to provide satisfying development while trying to look literary by giving each one their own tense and point of view. One is active in the past tense-third person, for example, while another functions in the first person-present. It's all very stylish indeed...but a complete failure designed, I fear, to disguise the lack of an interesting story. She should have focused on Mrs. Ross as her main character and told her story well.
Of course, those problems could be overlooked if she had not rendered "Tenderness" the one thing a good story never can be: boring. So, if you buy "Tenderness of Wolves," make it a package deal. Add a brand new coffee maker from housewares and, of course, a can of Costa to keep those judges happy. Sweet dreams."
"Super absorbing read about European settlers living amongst Native American indians in the chilly Canadian wilderness. Chapters are short and written a little confusingly from different points of view: Mrs. Ross whose 17 year old adopted son went missing at just about the same time her neighbor, French trapper Laurent, was murdered; Donald Moody an awkward young officer called in to investigate the murder and who becomes enamored with one of the Knox sisters whose cousins' long-ago disappearance is romanticized by everyone in the vicinity; and Thomas Sturrock a wily, aging lawyer/anthropologist/tracker who was once hired to find the missing sisters and who returns to Caulfield in hopes of claiming a valuable rosetta stone of sorts belonging to the murder victim.
There are many intriguing back stories involving insane asylums, espionage, inter-racial relationships, propriety and romance. I thought each character's individual story was fascinating on its own, and then when they overlapped and inter-related I was impressed by the quality of the storytelling. Not all my questions were answered in the end, but even that was true to life. This is Stef Penney's first novel, and it won the Costa Award in 2006."
"The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner. A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love -- for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it? One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolatelandscape -- home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good. In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, an epic for the ages.
I would rate this book 3.5/5. I especially enjoyed the visual description of the cold, icy terrain and landscape. I especially found these descriptions great because the author had never been to the cold northwest. It was due to her research that she was so able to describe it."
"My interest in this novel was heighted by two outside pieces of information: that the author was a screenwriter and that she had never been to the area north of Georgian Bay where the novel is set (and had been criticized for it). The first interested me because the novel is "cinematic" and written in scenes-and moves forward at a compelling pace; the second, because I've been decrying the place that research has assumed in novel writing these days and completely accept the author's counter that this is, after all, a work of the imagination. The setting is tangible and immediate; whether it is "real" doesn't matter as far as I can tell.
The Tenderness of Wolves is essentially a mystery which takes place 1860s Ontario, on Georgian Bay, a large bay to the northeast of Lake Huron. The action takes place in Caulfield on Dove River, a small settlement with no buildings over 13 years old, in a Norwegian religious colony and on a trading post of the Hudson Bay Company-and in the snow-covered plains and forests lying between. A trader and ex-Company man is murdered in his house on the edge of Dove River and found by a neighboring farmer's wife. The plot is complex with many characters and basically follows the actions of those who want to find out who murdered Laurent Jammet. The only first person voice is that of Mrs. Ross, who woman who discovers the body and whose son is suspected of the murder, but most of the novel it not first person narration.
The structure is interesting. There are four main sections, corresponding to the different settings and to the stages in the investigation. Within each section are subsections, using focusing on different characters. Mrs. Ross actually narrates the sections where she's the main focus, but you see her from the outside when she appears in the other sections. The other sections use a sort of Jamesian center of consciousness, with the narrator getting into the head of another character. One can easily see the influence of film.
It's a complex plot with lots of characters and no real interest in the man who was killed except that the wrong persons are being accused. I found this a page turner until maybe two-thirds of the way through where it suddenly occurred to me I didn't really care about any of the characters. Nor did I care who killed the trapper since it was clear it wasn't the two sympathetic characters who were accused. Nor were they in any real danger of punishment for a crime they didn't commit.
The role of "The Company" that controlled the fur trade in British North America, in the novel and in the community, is interesting and Company men are generally bad guys, except Moody who "figures it out" during the course of the novel. But that theme is generally ancillary and not really developed. (I was astounded when I first went shopping in Calgary years ago to find the main department store, referred to by initiates as "the Bay", was that same company which Wikipedia describes as the "oldest commercial corporation in North America".
My assessment of this novel: the structure is near perfect, the setting is powerful, the plot is OK, and the characters are skillfully imagined but ultimately bloodless. Mrs. Ross, for example, narrates bits of her past in an insane asylum where she evidently was the favorite of a nutty doctor (made me think of the main character in Atwood's Alias Grace) but the background generates questions that are never answered. That's true with other characters as well. Perhaps the difference is that the characterization in film, which of necessity relies on snippets, isn't really enough for a really effective novel."
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