This Tender Land

After reading William Kent Kruger's Ordinary Grace, I was hoping for another lovely story.  I didn't get it.  I don't know if this book is supposed to be a YA novel, but it reads like one, with several scenes whitewashed of deep emotion (the narrator kills two men in two separate instances, neither of which seems realistic).  The plot is not plausible at all, considering three young teenagers run away from an orphanage with a six-year-old girl.  Set during the Depression, you can accept some plot faults:  people lived off the land and wandered the countryside.  But this plot runs thin. I suppose it is supposed to be a picaresque novel, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn. The characters float down the Gilead River, hoping to reach St. Louis while avoiding capture by the bad, very bad, people from the orphanage who are chasing them.  The children encounter a mean man who holds them hostage and forces them to work in his fields; they join an evangelical tent revival group of con artists; they get separated and find each other. . . it just goes on and on.  I finished the book, but only because I felt I should, not because it was a good read.