![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The descriptions of the father’s dying hours are both graphic and poignant, and Franklin’s struggle to take in what he learns is simply but beautifully drawn. His father, who has bitterly disappointed him many times in the past, asks Franklin to take him on a trek into the nearby mountains and bury him sitting upright “in the warrior way.” Franklin reluctantly agrees to do so.ĭuring their brief, excruciating journey, his father tells him several poignant stories about his war experience and the boy’s long-dead mother, which are hard to listen to but help the son accept his father, and more profoundly, the mystery of life and death. When his birth father, a wretched alcoholic who lives in a nearby mill town, writes that he is dying and wants to see the boy, Franklin reluctantly travels to his dilapidated boardinghouse. This slim, beautiful, heart-wrenching novel by Canadian Ojibwe writer Richard Wagamese is the story of Franklin Starlight, a 16-year-old Indian boy who lives in the mountains of British Columbia toward the end of the last century with “the old man,” a benevolent white farmer who has raised him from infancy.įranklin is content with his quiet life on the farm and in the wilderness, but increasingly curious about where he came from. ![]() (Milkweed Editions, 246 pages, $16, now in paperback.) ![]()
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