SOURCE: "Searching for Home in High-Plains Canada," in The Christian Science Monitor, October 3, 1990, p. 13.

In the following review, Bencivenga discusses King's treatment of family relationships, alienation, and grief in Medicine River.

"Home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in," wrote the poet Robert Frost, in a stark, unromantic Yankee view of home in the life of a dying hired hand.

Home, and having to go there, is the central fact of this delightful, bittersweet first novel [Medicine River] by Thomas King, who gives us a 1980s cross-cultural version of William Saroyan's classic, The Human Comedy.

The setting is the Alberta prairie town of Medicine River. It butts against the Blackfoot Indian reserve. Despite a backdrop of bitter cold winters and a landscape that is high-plains vast—remote, desolate, solitary—readers will search long and hard in contemporary fiction to find as...