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Staff Pick
Another instant classic from an author whose career I’m so excited to continue following in the decades to come. Wandering Stars is exactly the book its title promises: a constellation of stories, all orbiting around the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the lives and legacies that unravel in its aftermath through the 20th and 21st centuries. Through Orange’s deeply felt characters, written in language that cuts to the quick, we feel the violence of assimilation and the ways that grief and trauma are passed down through generations. Wandering Stars is a masterpiece. Recommended By Kelsey F., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange's breakout best seller There There — winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize, the American Book Award, and one of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2018 — Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Red Feather's shooting in There There.
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star's son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father's jailer. Under Pratt's harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.
Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage — a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America's war on its own people.
Review
"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 Pilgrim Bell
Review
"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
Review
"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
About the Author
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award. He lives in Oakland, California.