Publishers Weekly
★ 12/18/2023
Orange follows up his PEN/Hemingway-winning There There with a stirring portrait of the fractured but resilient Bear Shield-Red Feather family in the wake of the Oakland powwow shooting that closed out the previous book. The sequel is wider in scope, beginning with stories of the family’s ancestors before catching up to the present. Those ancestors include Jude Star, who barely survives the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in what is now Colorado as a youth and is sent to a prison in St. Augustine, Fla., where he’s forced to learn English and read the Bible. Jude later works as a farmhand in Oklahoma and raises his son Charles, who is sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. As a young man in the early 1900s, Charles drifts into San Francisco, where he becomes addicted to morphine while contending with the trauma of forced assimilation and unspecified abuse at Carlisle (“There is something deeper down, doing its dark work on him some further forgotten thing, but what is it? His life is about knowing it is there but not ever wanting to see it”). In the present, high school freshman Orvil Red Feather recovers at home in Oakland after being struck by a stray bullet during the powwow. Like Charles, he becomes addicted to opiates and struggles to connect with his cultural identity after his grandmother neglects to share details about their Cheyenne heritage. With incandescent prose and precise insights, Orange mines the gaps in his characters’ memories and finds meaning in the stories of their lives. This devastating narrative confirms Orange’s essential place in the canon of Native American literature. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi, Inc. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
A Most Anticipated Book: TIME, Real Simple, Oprah Daily, Vulture, NPR, The Millions
“Orange’s ability to highlight the contradictory forces that coexist within friendships, familial relationships and the characters themselves, who contend with holding private and public identities, makes Wandering Stars a towering achievement.” —The New York Times
“A centuries-spanning epic of a Native family that manages to feel profoundly intimate.” —Vulture
“An eloquent indictment of the devastating long-term effects of the massacre, dislocation and forced assimilation of Native Americans, [Wandering Stars] is also a heartfelt paean to the importance of family and of ancestors' stories in recovering a sense of belonging and identity . . . Wandering Stars more than fulfills the promise of There There.” —NPR
“Outstanding . . . A dazzling work of literary fiction that springs from the center of otherness, [Wandering Stars] delves deep into what it means to be Native American in this country. At once a novel about family, loss, history, and addiction as well as a narrative that explores racism and belonging, Wandering Stars is proof that the sophomore slump is a myth, at least when it comes to Orange.” —The Boston Globe
“A multilayered, blisteringly honest novel . . . [Wandering Stars] undeniably soars.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“A rich expansion of Orange’s universe . . . As Wandering Stars sweeps through the decades, Orange gathers up moments of love and despair in stories that demonstrate what a piercing writer he is . . . It’s not too early to say that Orange is building a body of literature that reshapes the Native American story in the United States. Book by book, he’s correcting the dearth of Indian stories even while depicting the tragic cost of that silence.” —The Washington Post
"Wandering Stars probes the aftermath of atrocity, seeing history and its horrors as heritable . . . The reader can see what the characters cannot—what forced migration and residential schools have prevented them from seeing and sharing. The reader can see how the addictions and terrors, as well as the capacity for pleasure and endurance, echo across the Red Feather family." —The New Yorker
“In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange finds different pockets, not just to flex, but to really get to beyond the marrow of this wonderfully blistered world. The work is so varied and textured but also ruthlessly clear in what it’s costing and what it’s destroying.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
“If there was any doubt after his incredible debut, there should be none now: Tommy Orange is one of our most important writers. The way he weaves time and life together, demands we remember how our history shapes us. In this novel the pain and resilience of generations are summoned beautifully. A wonderous journey and a necessary reminder.” —Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah, author of Chain Gang All Stars
“No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange. With an all-seeing heart, he traces historical and contemporary cruelties, vagaries, salvations and solutions visited upon young Cheyenne people, who cope with the impossible. In them, Tommy finds the unnerving strength that results when a broken spirit mends itself, when a wandering star finds its place, when, in spite of everything, Native people manage to survive.” —Louise Erdrich, author of The Sentence
“Here is something rare: a novel as generous as it is genius. The care coursing through these pages—care for people, care for art, care for truth—is nothing short of radical. Orange writes with a historian’s attention to detail and a poet’s attention to language, animating every passage with an energy that only he can conjure, transfixing and transforming. Wandering Stars is not just a book; it is a creature made of song and blood, multitudinous and infinite. This novel is alive.” —Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch
“In his follow up to There There, Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars is a powerful and indelible work of fiction. There is so much the reader is given: love, hate, happiness, despair, knowing, unknowing, failure, redemption, and more, all of which is to say that this is a book of life—a necessary story for everyone. For the sake of knowing, of understanding, Wandering Stars blew my heart into a thousand pieces and put it all back together again. This is a masterwork that will not be forgotten, a masterwork that will forever be part of you.” —Morgan Talty, best selling author of Night of the Living Rez
“In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange opens us up to these big lives full of hope and triumph and love and freedom—but then the world comes in, history comes in, drugs and nation and bullets and the big and small lonelinesses come in. Richard Pryor said he wanted to get you laughing so your mouth would be open when he poured the poison down, and that's what Orange is doing here. Anyone can say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but Tommy says the hardest things plain—beyond artifice, beyond confection. That clarity, that radical lucidity, that’s the mark of true genius, a word I use here without hyperbole. Think Kafka, Lispector, Borges. Wandering Stars is the kind of book that saves lives, that makes remaining in the world feel a little more possible. It’s art of the highest order, written by one of our language’s most significant and urgent practitioners.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
"I don't know how many lives Tommy Orange has lived in this one to be able to do what he does so well, but Wandering Stars is a masterwork and an example of craft meeting storytelling excellence. If you loved Susan Power's The Grass Dancer and Michelle Good's Five Little Indians, if you love the writing of Lee Maracle, katherena vermette, Louise Erdrich, Cherie Demaline, Eden Robinson, Craig Lesley, Morgan Talty and James Welch, you are going to hold this novel to your heart because this is that magnificent. Bravo, Tommy Orange. Stand proud with what you've accomplished here. Wow!" —Richard Van Camp, author of The Moon of Letting Go
“A stirring portrait of the fractured but resilient Bear Shield-Red Feather family in the wake of the Oakland powwow shooting that closed out the previous book . . . With incandescent prose and precise insights, Orange mines the gaps in his characters’ memories and finds meaning in the stories of their lives. This devastating narrative confirms Orange’s essential place in the canon of Native American literature.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A searing study of the consequences of a genocide . . . Orange is gifted at elevating his characters without romanticizing them, and though the cast is smaller than in There There, the sense of history is deeper.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Tender yet eviscerating . . . There is so much life in this mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic novel . . . Orange's second novel is both prequel and sequel to the striking There, There and a centuries-spanning novel that stands firmly on its own.” —Booklist (starred review)
Library Journal
01/01/2024
This follow-up to Orange's debut novel, There There, delivers a considerably different reading experience than its progenitor. Moving away from that earlier novel's vast, intricately woven tapestry of interconnections, Orange narrows his focus to the lineage and immediate family of There There's Orvil Red Feather, beginning with his great-great-great-grandfather in the 1800s and continuing until 2018, where most of the narrative takes place, examining the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. But it isn't just the novel's construction that changes shape. Orange forgoes the explosive tragedy that punctuated his first novel and instead documents its lingering distension. It's a potent and intimate pivot, one that builds in power as he mines the abiding grief of childhood's passage, particularly within the contexts of Indigenous history and contemporaneity. This second work lacks the sense of sprawl that invigorated Orange's debut, and there are stretches in the central section that can feel pulled too thin and blunted by repetition, leaving its three parts a bit wobbly in balance. But, as was the case with There There, he builds to a memorable crescendo. VERDICT Orange smartly avoids the trap of attempting the same trick twice, tweaking his approach to story and structure and once again showcasing his ability to deliver characters with clear, complex interiority.—Luke Gorham
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-12-06
A lyrical, multigenerational exploration of Native American oppression.
Orange’s second novel is partly a sequel to his acclaimed 2018 debut, There There—its second half centers on members of the Red Feather family after the events of the first book. But Orange moves the story back as well as forward. He rewinds to 1864’s Sand Creek Massacre, in which Natives were killed or displaced by the U.S. Army. One survivor (and Red Feather family ancestor), Jude Star, is a mute man imprisoned and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of several institutions designed to strip Native Americans of their history and folklore. As Orange tracks the generations that follow, he suggests that such schools did their jobs well, but imperfectly—essential traces of Native heritage endure despite decades of murder, poverty, and addiction. That theme crystallizes as the story shifts to 2018, depicting Orvil Red Feather’s struggles after he was shot at a powwow in Oakland, California. His path is perilous, especially thanks to a school friend with easy access to addictive pain medications. But Orvil doesn’t quite lose his grip on history, whether that’s through stories of his mother participating in the 19-month Native American occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971, or cowboys-and-Indians lore he contemplates while playing Red Dead Redemption 2. “Everyone only thinks we’re from the past, but then we’re here, but they don’t know we’re still here,” as Orvil’s brother Lony puts it. Orange is gifted at elevating his characters without romanticizing them, and though the cast is smaller than in There There, the sense of history is deeper. And the timbre of individual voices is richer, from Orvil’s streetwise patter to the officiousness of Carlisle founder Richard Henry Pratt, determined to send “the vanishing race off into final captivity before disappearing into history forever.” He failed, but this is a powerful indictment of his—and America’s—efforts.
A searing study of the consequences of a genocide.
