Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84680 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-07
• Binding: Hardcover
• 466 pages

Crimesquad.com
"This subtle and superb novel..."

The Glasgow Herald "
...a highly-assured debut...Stef Penney has written an absorbing
and stylish mystery.

Birmingham Post
...a quite remarkable debut novel

Customer Reviews

one good book you certainly can judge by it's cover!

The books I enjoy most are the ones that not only tell a moving and uplifting story but take you off to stange or exotic locaions. This is certainly true of Tan Twan Eng's beautifully crafted "The Gift of Rain"The Gift of Rain - the best thing I've read for an absolute age. But this one is really good too - although the setting couldn't contrast more starkly with the tropical lushness of 1930's Malaysia. This time the landscape is 19th century Canada, the white, windswept wilderness of the Ontario frontier in the 1860's. This is one good book that you certainly can judge by it's cover. If, like me, you like stories that take the reader on a journey, then this is for you. There are also believable characters and nicel interlinked sub-plots. Turn the heating up a notch or two first mind, or have plenty of logs ready for the fire if you have one. And give 'The Gift of Rain' a go too, if you haven't already - you won't be sorry.

The Slenderness of Plot
Raymond Chandler once famously said of thriller-writing, "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." Well, Stef Penney has her own remedy for spicing up her narrative: when things get dull, send another search party out into the snowy wastes.

Much of her debut novel is taken up with various combinations of searchers ploughing through the snow and ice, often in pursuit of other intrepid ramblers, or going round in circles like Pooh and Piglet. At one point there are 5 different groups of hunters and hunted lost amongst the snow drifts... and in the end you really don't care who gets out alive.

When her characters are not boldy going where others have gone before, then they sit around in trading posts and behave in ways that you might find surprising for 1867, the year in which the novel is set - we have homosexual relationships and cigarette-smoking feminists, and when they swear (which they do frequently) it's with true 21st century gusto. There are other anachronisms - looking for them will pass away the time until the next search party leaves the stockade.

Penney's writing is very much off-the-peg; she never bothers to come up with an original turn of phrase if a wellworn cliche will do just as well, and the whole book is in dire need of an editor's knife. The flimsy plot centres, for a while at least, on a rather far-fetched McGuffin - an inscribed bone - which in the end Penney herself can't be bothered to resolve, and she casts it aside in a manner which treats her readers with contempt. A very over-rated first novel, and one burdened with a meaningless title which presumably the publishers thought would help sell it to an undiscerning public. Looks like it worked.

2006 must have been a very poor year for books
The Tenderness of Wolves is yet another reason why one should never trust the committees of literary prizes such as the Costa Book of the Year awards, which this won in 2006. Set in the wilds of Canada during the late nineteenth century, the book starts with the brutal murder of a French Canadian trader. When all signs seem to point towards her son, Katherine Ross sets out on a treacherous journey through the wilderness to clear his name.

So far, so so. From a vaguely promising start - the murder sends shockwaves through the tiny communities of Dove River and Caulfield, uncovering all sorts of long buried secrets and fissures within the community - the plot manages to become both thin and convoluted. Whenever the action seems to get a little stale, Penney sends another set of characters out into the vast, deserted, snowbound landscapes, or chooses to put a different minor character at the forefront of the narrative. The constant changes in narrative are both annoying and frustrating, switching from the Mrs Ross in the first person to pretty much anyone we have come across. The writing is trite and formulaic, with endless subplots and memories - each less convincing than the last - thrown willy nilly into the mix, and frequently left unresolved.

I gave this two stars because, unlike a one star book, I didn't feel the urge to hurl it out of the window as soon as I'd finished it, and the descriptions of the wilderness were quite remarkable. Also, she gets a sympahy vote for triumphing over adversity - Penney was (is?) an agoraphobic who has never been to Canada. But I'd choke on my words if I recommended this even to someone I didn't particularly like. My advice? Don't bother.