Prudence
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A haunting and unforgettable novel about love, loss, race, and desire in World War II–era America.
On a sweltering day in August 1942, Frankie Washburn returns to his family’s rustic Minnesota resort for one last visit before he joins the war as a bombardier, headed for the darkened skies over Europe. Awaiting him at the Pines are those he’s about to leave behind: his hovering mother; the distant father to whom he’s been a disappointment; the Indian caretaker who’s been more of a father to him than his own; and Billy, the childhood friend who over the years has become something much more intimate. But before the homecoming can be celebrated, the search for a German soldier, escaped from the POW camp across the river, explodes in a shocking act of violence, with consequences that will reverberate years into the future for all of them and that will shape how each of them makes sense of their lives.
With Prudence, Treuer delivers his most ambitious and captivating novel yet. Powerful and wholly original, it’s a story of desire and loss and the search for connection in a riven world; of race and class in a supposedly more innocent era. Most profoundly, it’s about the secrets we choose to keep, the ones we can’t help but tell, and who—and how—we’re allowed to love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After 2012's much-lauded examination of Native American life on the reservation (Rez Life), Ojibwe writer Treuer turns once again to fiction in his achingly moving fourth novel. Here, he uses flashbacks and myriad points of view to relay both the lead-up to and the aftermath of a shocking event that occurs one muggy summer night in 1942. In the search to hunt down an escaped German prisoner from a WWII POW camp, a nine-year-old Indian girl is mistakenly shot and killed in the woods abutting the Pines, the rural Minnesota summer estate belonging to the Washburns. Though her older sister Prudence emerges unscathed, the accident alters the fates of everyone involved, including vulnerable Frankie Washburn, who pulled the trigger; Billy, the Indian boy who's secretly captured Frankie's heart and who takes the blame for the shooting; Felix, the stoic Indian widower who works on the Washburns' property and takes Prudence in after her sister's burial; and mouthy Prudence, who drinks and fornicates her way through the pain. Treuer adds depth to each of the characters' stories by revealing tidbits of backstory, but it's the saga of Frankie and Billy's thwarted love and the consequences of their actions that feels the most devastating and resonant, haunting both men as they're shipped off to war. Perhaps most fitting is the book's title which speaks volumes about each character's integrity, culpability, and resilience in the face of a collective tragedy.
