The New York Times Book Review - Liam Callanan
…Richard Wagamese's Medicine Walk…feels less written than painstakingly etched into something more permanent than paper…For Frank, a "hunt was a process." And so is the way Wagamese pursues his story: biding his time, never rushing, calibrating each word so carefully that he too never seems to waste a shot…And here's Wagamese's feat. Though death saturates these pages, not a word here is lugubrious. Though revelations abound, there are no cheap surprises. "Plain says it plain around here," the old man cautions Eldon at one point. And yet there's nothing plain about this plain-spoken book.
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/09/2015
Canadian author and memoirist Wagamese (Indian Horse) has penned a complex, rugged, and moving father-son novel. Franklin Starlight, a 16-year-old Ojibway Indian, is summoned to the Canadian mill town of Parson’s Gap by his alcoholic father, Eldon Starlight, to discuss an important matter. Franklin goes reluctantly, since he has a dysfunctional and distant relationship with his dad. (Franklin was raised by a rancher identified only as “the old man.”) Eldon persuades Franklin to take him on a 40-mile journey to an isolated ridge to die (he suffers from a cirrhotic liver) so that he can be buried “in the warrior way.” Wagamese deftly weaves in the backstory as Eldon, racked with heartache and horror, relates different episodes from his past (when he’s lucid enough). Initially, Franklin is unsympathetic to his father’s plight, which seems to be caused by a lifetime of boozing and womanizing. However, as Eldon tells his tales, including that of his harrowing ordeal in the Korean War, which precipitated his chronic drinking, Franklin comes to see his father in a new light. Wagamese’s muscular prose and spare tone complement this gem of a narrative, which examines the bond between father and son. (May)
From the Publisher
Praise for Medicine Walk:
"Wagamese has penned a complex, rugged, and moving father-son novel. His muscular prose and spare tone complement this gem of a narrative.".—Publishers Weekly [STARRED review]
"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. A powerful novel of hard men in hard country reminiscent of Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall.—Kirkus
“Richard Wagamese is a born storyteller."
—Louise Erdrich
“Richard Wagamese has become a master. This brilliant novel (Medicine Walk) is his heart song, his crowning achievement thus far.”
—Joseph Boyden
“A deeply felt and profoundly moving novel, written in the kind of sure, clear prose that brings to mind the work of the great North American masters like Steinbeck. But Wagamese's voice and vision are also completely his own, as is the important and powerful story he has to tell.”
—Jane Urquhart
“Medicine Walk is a masterpiece, a work of art that explores human interconnectedness with a level of artistry so superb that the personal becomes eternal.”
—National Post
“This is very much a novel about the role of stories in our lives, those we tell ourselves about ourselves and those we agree to live by . . . Wagamese understands that the stories we don’t tell are as important as the ones we do . . . But Medicine Walk is also testament to the redemptive power of love and compassion.”
—Globe and Mail
Library Journal
03/01/2015
"Got raised to speak my peace and ask direct," says Franklin Starlight, and the same must be true of award-winning Canadian author Wagamese (Him Standing), whose latest novel unfolds in still, piercing language. A self-contained 16-year-old of mixed Ojibway and Scots descent, Franklin has gone looking for the father who abandoned him as a babe and is now dying of alcohol abuse. His father wants to be taken someplace special to die—"the only place I felt like I belonged"—and as they ride into the mountains he tells a sometimes harrowing story that brings them both peace. VERDICT A soothingly moving novel of rapprochement and family roots for all readers.
JULY 2015 - AudioFile
Tom Stechschulte’s skill in voicing the cadence of Native American characters makes him the perfect narrator for this breathtaking novel about a teen and his alcoholic father, both of Canada’s First Nations. Sixteen-year-old Franklin Starlight has been raised by an old man who has taught him to respect the abundance of nature. When Frank is summoned for a visit with his real father, he encounters a man who returned from service in Korea with PTSD and is now dying from years of drinking. Stechschulte sensitively portrays the boy’s vulnerability and deep cynicism as the pair embark on a horseback trip into the precipitous backcountry, seeking a burial place for the dying man. The exquisite, almost lyrical, prose is beautifully rendered by Stechschulte as the story takes the listener on a journey of physical struggle and personal redemption. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Review
2015-01-21
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 ridge…sitt[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 angular…grown 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.
