Disappointing

Most of Thomas King's works are beautiful and inspire much thinking, especially his short stories. However, Medicine River, though with its genuine characters and subtleties, does nothing to captivate me as a reader. It's as if this story was demanding me to pay attention to its endless digressions and countless characters instead of me actually wanting to do so. Medicine River suffers greatly from a lack of focus. It relies on many references of each characters made by Will to interest the reader; because of how numerous the cast of flat characters are, few are given appropriate interactions to flesh them out. None of the characters go through much of a change. The story does well to warn people to not just "go with the flow" with everything as Will does, and perhaps actually take a stand to lead a purposeful life.

The narration was decent. A tad too monotone at some points when Will should have more emotion (Though I guess it does somewhat fit Will's lifeless personality).