Mark's Reviews > The Tenderness of Wolves

For what it's worth, this is the first book I've read since I joined Goodreads to which I've given five stars. So, at the risk of gushing, I'm telling you to run, don't walk, to reserve this at your local library or buy it.

The setting is the 1860s in Canada, where the small community of Caulfield and cabins strung along the Dove River sit at the edge of the great North Woods. The book opens with the murder of French-Canadian trapper, and that event unlocks several intertwined subplots among the people who live in this wintry landscape, dominated by the Hudson Bay Company.

The sharp description of the landscape and lives of European settlers and Indians alike is all the more remarkable because Stef Penney was agoraphobic when she wrote this and was unable to visit the scene of her novel, instead doing all of her research from the safe womb of the British Library.

This is also much more than a mystery, with finely drawn human portraits, stories of forbidden love and heartbreaking loss, all set in a time and place that is vividly evoked. If it were possible, I'd coin the term histery for this amalgam.

When the trapper is found dead in his cabin, a young man, Francis Ross, also disappears and is the first suspect. His father hunts for him briefly, but after he returns home empty-handed, Francis' mother is determined to search for him herself, and to her own surprise, she ends up going off secretly with a man named William Parker who is half-Indian and who has just escaped from official custody as a suspect in the murder.

The killing is the biggest sensation in the community since the disapperance several years earlier of two girls, who some feel died in the woods and were eaten by wolves, a story none of the experienced woodspeople believe, and a chapter of history that will make an eerie reappearance as the novel progresses.

Penney is a screenwriter by trade, and part of the sheer enjoyment of this book is the movie-like pacing, with short chapters weaving expertly back and forth between three and four subplots (I'd be surprised if this isn't made into a movie at some point). Mixed into this cast of characters is a venal and paranoid Hudson Bay official, a utopian settlement of Norwegian Christians deep in the woods, a charismatic but troubled Hudson Bay officer who lives deep in the forest, a new Company employee who is trying to prove himself and trying to decide which woman he loves, and the mysterious man that young Francis Ross saw and followed after the murder.

Penney's gift for language also elevates this above many a plot-driven mystery. At one point, she describes a narrow-minded resident of the village this way: "She considers herself a well-traveled woman, and from each place she has been to, she has brought away a prejudice as a souvenir."

Or this landscape description: "As suddenly as a smile, the sun causes beauty to break out on this sullen plain. Beyond the pallisade lies a perfect landscape, like a sculpture carved in salt, crystalline and pure. Meanwhile we trudge through roiled slush and dirt, trampled and stained with the effluent of dogs."

And near the end of the book, a description of the son's recuperation: "It has been weeks that he has lain up in the white room, his muscles softening and his skin growing pale like rhubarb under a pot."

A page turner with bonuses. You can't ask for more.