Stef Penney
Fiction 2006 | 371 pages
I was looking for a book set in the north Canada provinces and territories. The one is set in the Northwest Territories. (It is a long story WHY I was looking for a book set in the Territories, but if you want a list of books set in every province and territory in Canada, let me know. I created such a list.)
The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny, isolated settlement in the Northwest Territories, 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.
On the day that Laurent is killed, his 17-year-old next door neighbor, Francis Ross, disappears. The plot begins to unfold as Mrs. Ross, our protagonist and narrator, leaves her lackadaisical husband behind and goes in search of her son, traveling deeper into the northern wilds of Canada. Others also begin to search, including Andrew Knox, the Dove River town magistrate; three men from the Hudson Bay Company; Thomas Sturrock, an amusing American itinerant trader; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide; and a native guide, Jacob, who works for the Company and has chosen to protect Donald Moody, a clumsy young Company representative
One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape - 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.
Once all of these characters have been introduced, the novel follows their respective journeys - and the discoveries they make along the way - through a land gripped by winter.
Much is left unresolved at the end, so don't look for all the loose ends to be tied together with a bow. We don't even actually find out who killed Jammet, though a number of reviewers have inadvertantly attributed the murder to various characters.
In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, romance, mystery and humor into an exhilarating thriller. I loved her writing. Penney suffered from agoraphobia at the time she wrote this novel and did not actually visit the Northwest Territories. She used museums and books to do her research. For a novel which takes place almost entirely outdoors in very remote and snowy land, I found her descriptions of the landscape and weather astounding.
The lovely title was a mystery until the end. I don't think it is a spoiler for me to tell you what it refers to, but in case you don't want to know, I will add it below the date I read this fine book, February 2026.
I do recommend this mystery, with its myriad of fascinating characters, powerfully describing a time long gone.
February 2026
As it turns out, The Tenderness of Wolves refers not to the actual wolves our characters encounter, but it is a metaphor for the people of northern Canada, who work very hard and who wander and seek food and shelter, and love, who can be tender or violent, and are at times isolated and at times in community.