When a book is described as ‘astonishing’ by Margaret Atwood then I take notice – but, you know, this time I have to disagree. Orange kicks off with a moving, fascinating ‘prelude’, a kind of commentary on the representation of ‘Indians’ in culture. But once the story proper starts, a series of revolving 3rd person POV vignettes getting progressively shorter, my engagement fell away. The individual stories didn’t either engage me or really have anything significant to say, and there are so many of them, so many different characters who are all secretly bound together, all heading off to the powwow.

The sensitivity of Orange’s writing in the ‘prelude’ and ‘interlude’ is of a different quality altogether from that of his storytelling, and is the reason why I’m giving this 2.5 stars. Without those sections, the prose is bland, the characters thin, too many commercial hot-buttons being pressed about lost fathers and children – and don’t even get me started on the ending.
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Overall, there’s a really important topic here but this book stumbles around trying to find a way to turn it into a story – falling back on sensationalism and soap-opera. In contrast, the ‘prelude’ and ‘interlude’ are thoughtful, self-reflective and provocative: if only there’d been more of that in the final book. So this didn’t work for me but Orange is an important voice – I hope he finds a more natural way to articulate what he wants to say next time.