Medicine walk

Title:

Medicine walk

Author:

Wagamese, Richard.

Personal Author:

Wagamese, Richard.

ISBN:

9781571311153

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

245 pages ; 23 cm

Abstract:

Set in the dramatic landscape of the BC Interior, 16 year-old Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, Eldon, a man he barely knows. The rare moments they have shared trouble Frank, but, he answers the call, a son's duty to a father. He finds Eldon dying of liver failure after years of heavy drinking. Eldon asks his son to take him into the mountains, so he may be buried in the traditional Ojibway manner.

Subject Term:

Indians of North America -- Fiction.

Interpersonal relations -- Fiction.

Fathers and sons -- Fiction.

Storytelling -- Fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION WAGAMES	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

"A novel about the role of stories in our lives, those we tell ourselves about ourselves and those we agree to live by." --Globe and Mail

When Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, he has mixed emotions. Raised by the old man he was entrusted to soon after his birth, Frank is haunted by the brief and troubling moments he has shared with his father, Eldon. When he finally travels by horseback to town, he finds Eldon on the edge of death, decimated from years of drinking.

The two undertake a difficult journey into the mountainous backcountry, in search of a place for Eldon to die and be buried in the warrior way. As they travel, Eldon tells his son the story of his own life--from an impoverished childhood to combat in the Korean War and his shell-shocked return. Through the fog of pain, Eldon relates to his son these desolate moments, as well as his life's fleeting but nonetheless crucial moments of happiness and hope, the sacrifices made in the name of love. And in telling his story, Eldon offers his son a world the boy has never seen, a history he has never known.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Wagamese (Dream Wheels, 2006, etc.) sends young Franklin Starlight on a "medicine walk," a journey of knowing, in this story about the nature of manhood. Franklin's been called to western Canada's lumber-mill town of Parson's Gap by his father, Eldon, who has lived "a life with benchmarks that only ever set out the boundaries of pain and loss, woe and regret, nothing to bring him comfort in his last days." Eldon's dying. He wants Franklin to carry him into the mountains to "a ridgesitt[ing] above a narrow valley with a high range behind it," a place Eldon once found peace. "I need you to bury me facing east...[s]itting up in the warrior way." His father ever absent, Franklin was raised by an old man with an unexplained connection to Eldon, a farmer who cherished him and taught him to cherish the land-centered ways of Franklin's Ojibway and Cree people. Franklin is only 16, "big for his age, rawboned and angulargrown comfortable with aloneness and he bore an economy with words that was blunt, direct." Wagamese is a keen observer, sketching places ("stars in the thick purple swaddle of the sky") or people ("He leaned when he walked, canted at a hard angle to the right as though gravity worked with different properties on him") elegantly, economically, all while gracefully employing literary insight to deftly dissect blood ties lingering in fractured families. During the trek, Franklin finally learns about his father, "the story of him etched in blood and tears and departures as sudden as the snapping of a bone"his own father dead in WWII; how he nearly killed his mother's abusive boyfriend; his nightmarish Korean War experience; and his broken promises to Franklin's mother. A powerful novel of hard men in hard country reminiscent of Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.