Both a sequel and a prequel to his excellent book There There, Wandering Stars is yet another outstanding Tommy Orange book. It's about family, inheritance, addiction, how we decide to move through the world, how some are forced through the world, and all sorts of great big themes, but you're never beat over the head with over-cooked descriptions of character and place. Basically, I'll be interested in reading anything he wants to write.

Tommy Orange's prose will always get me. He can get away with throwing in an essay at the start of a novel or mixing fact and fiction to let me know what he really thinks.

Not as propulsive as the firecracker that was There There, but still as gorgeous and heartbreaking. The first third takes us through the family history of the Star-Red Feather surviving massacres, abuse, erasure, and addictions. The rest brings us to the aftermath of the pow wow in There There. Generational trauma, loss, poverty, mass shootings, these will continually grind you down. What does it mean to survive? Can we go beyond simply surviving and thrive?
Every character goes through it in this novel, but thankfully this isn't just a bleak book about adversity and addiction. There is hope, resiliency, and love. Every character is allowed to break down, wander, and come back - though not necessarily to exactly what they left or want.

While I loved this book, I found the first part stronger than the second. There were moments where the contemporary section meandered a bit too much and I'm not sure what happened with some of the subplots. This is a much slower read than There There, but a gorgeous way to bookend that novel.

Tommy Orange brilliantly writes to reach the souls of people. He puts you in the stories with the characters to feel everything they feel.
He sets Wandering Stars up with a historical narrative looking into the ancestral timeline of the Red Feather family—Victor Bear Shield and Charles Star experience massacres and Christianizing. While natives are persecuted and their history taken away, it affects future generations. Fast forward to the modern day, the Red Feathers have seen their share of trauma and family strife. Tommy Orange wants us to see the effects of addiction throughout the years and how one family deals with their pain. Orvil, one of the main characters in Orange's previous book, was shot at a powwow in the Oakland Coliseum. His recovery included pain pills, which he started to enjoy and became addicted to. At the same time, Orvil experiences his post-recovery, and his brothers and great-aunts are navigating their trauma and pain.
Orange touches on every aspect of life's questions about who we are, where we came from, and what we would have been if the bad things hadn't happened to us.
Experience this novel as an uncovering of acceptance and the idea that we are more than what has happened to us. We can start again; we can begin a new story.

There, There left a lot of questions in the aftermath of the shooting. I had high hopes Wandering Stars would pick up right where Tommy Orange left off. Instead, he took a historical look at the history of trauma in tribal communities. Seeing the aftermath of the shooting through Orvil and the three brother’s view was an interesting approach that left the reader confused as to whose story is being told.

A sort of sequel to There There that starts with the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and continues through the traumatic aftermath of Orvil Red Feather's shooting. The last half is a close and excruciating look at addiction.

This is a really complicated book to review, honestly. It's a novel, that sometimes reads like a nonfiction - and, unfortunately, is likely based on a lot of real experiences. It has an almost mythical quality at times; Orange seamlessly blends real events with potentially imagined or dreamed or symbolic events in a way that emphasizes that, real or not, they are all equally important parts of the lived experience. This book is, above all, a complex look at collective and intergenerational trauma.

All this said, the stream of consciousness writing style wore me down at times. I haven't read There, There, but was really excited about this release based on the description. Based on similar struggles with a few other texts, I'm assuming it's a cultural approach to storytelling that is just different from what I'm accustomed to. I had to take a break about half way through, which is a rarity. Still, I'm glad I stuck it out and I think this is an important and valuable read. I also found myself highlighting passages constantly while reading; some beautiful, some that just punch you right in the gut.

Thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for the ARC. Wandering Stars publishes February 27th.

This book absolutely broke me, but this is an important, beautifully written book that is not to be missed. One caveat for me personally is that it had been awhile since I had read 'There, There,' and I wish I had re-read the previous book before diving into this one. Still, it is evident that this book was written from the heart and rendered with the upmost care.

Wandering Stars by Tonny Orange is a prequel and sequel to his award winning first novel, There There. The prequel portion is more meaningful if you’ve read his first book. This book provides a family tree of the Bear Shield-Red Feather family which I found very helpful while reading this multi-generational saga. It has less characters than his first book which made it easier to follow. This is not to say that it is an easy read because dealing with intergenerational trauma and the far-reaching effects of what we, as a country did, to First Nation peoples is heartbreaking. The novel deals with the forces of addiction, loss of identity, poverty and family bonds through a variety of narrators. Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

3.5/5 stars for me.

Thank you for an advanced electronic copy of this book. I really enjoyed There, There and was excited to see book 2 coming out.

Like There, There - Wandering Stars explores themes of what it means to be native in America. WS starts back during the Sand Creek Massacre and follows a few generations in Colorado and then skips forward to the aftermath of There, There.

A lot of the themes and hardships of the characters are hard to read because they are real and dark. Very beautifully written, each character in the second half of the book has depth and you are rooting for them to overcome generational trauma and succeed, what ever that may look like.

I was slightly disappointed in the chapters with the characters from previous generations of the family. It felt like a glossing over of what happened to them rather than learning who they are at their core. Something I know Orange is good at writing. I rarely say a book could have been longer, but I would have liked to spend some more time with the characters of the past.

Over all, I enjoyed this follow up and felt a sense of closure at the end of the book. The second half of the book was really great, although the time jumps seemed like the could have flowed a little bit smoother. I am excited to see what Tommy Orange does next.

The author describes the brutality faced by Native Americans as "white" Americans tried to take away the culture and traditions of the Native Americans. A difficult read, but a necessary one.

3.5 stars-Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book, releasing in February 2024!

I enjoyed Orange's debut novel There There-this ends up turning into pretty much a direct sequel as it follows the story of Orvil and his family who we are introduced to in the first book. Reading There There isn't required, but I'd advise it just because the background experiences of the characters in that book do contribute to what happens here. The writing is beautiful and Orange does an amazing job of giving each point-of-view character a distinctive voice. I liked the overall impact of the first portion of the book telling the historical stories of past generations of the family, but I think it became a more cohesive read in the second part when it narrowed down to Orvil's generation. This one didn't hit me quite as strongly as There There did, but the writing is still great-if you liked the first book, there's no reason not to read the second one.

This latest work from Tommy Orange is a poignant reflection on the plight of Native Indians in America. This novel felt very reminiscent of 'Homegoing', in that we follow multiple generations of the Star family. While it is a very difficult read, it is a must read. Excellent storytelling.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

I very much enjoyed Tommy Orange’s 2018 novel, There There, so I was eager to read an ARC copy of his forthcoming novel, Wandering Stars, to be published in late February 2024.

While Wandering Stars is a follow-up (actually, I’d call it more a “deep-dive” into one of the families featured in There There), you don’t need to have read the first book recently - or at all - to enjoy and appreciate this newer one.

For me, Wandering Stars packed a bigger emotional punch than There There (which is saying a lot). I found that I needed to take brief breaks in my reading now and then, just to settle myself before I could continue on. It is an intense read, with a heartbreakingly raw - and very, very Real - storyline. As in There There, the language in Wandering Stars is beautiful – honest and fresh, and a pleasure to read. Orange employs shifting points of view/narrative voices brilliantly, which deepens the understanding of the individual characters while still tying them together as a whole.

Wandering Stars is packed with the brutal truth of addiction, generational trauma, and cultural identity. It’s lovely, honest, heartbreaking . . . and, in the end, also full of hope.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 27, 2024.

5 stars.

Wow. Intensely and suffocatingly real without sacrificing beautifully composed prose, Tommy Orange was born to give us these stories. The emotion and feeling present in his works demand to be felt by all readers, regardless of cultural background or prior knowledge.
As an expansion on the characters introduced in his first novel, There There, Wandering Stars doesn't treat its predecessor as a prerequisite but rather an entirely separate story to experience.
As in There There, the characters are so carefully devised that their stories feel casually intertwined. Everything is so intentional, but nothing is ever spoon-fed to the reader. These strong men and women overcome just to fall and overcome again. Orange discusses the importance of cultural identity without creating any characters who sacrifice their individuality. I cannot emphasize enough how the characters in Wandering Stars are able to realistically challenge their surroundings and exhibit a resiliency that is astounding yet genuine.
Tommy Orange is a force in the literary space, on his way to the literary canon, and Wandering Stars did not fall into the shadow of his first novel by any means. Reading Tommy Orange is a reckoning with humanity, past and present. Typically, fiction requires a genre to pique interest- at least some appeal terms. Tommy Orange is for everyone. I can just see this title appearing on curriculums across the country(right alongside There There) where it should be.

Tommy Orange's most recent novel is not an easy read, but it's an important read. The novel starts off with a bit of a history lesson, one that reminds readers of the injustices that have been piled onto Native Americans, then follows certain individuals, all who become addicted to drugs at one point of their lives, and the novel ends in current times, and showcases two families with sons, one who has a father that somewhat reminds you of "Breaking Bad, manufacturing drugs in their basement, which the sons sell, and another teen who lives with his two grandmothers, and younger brothers, another family that is immersed into addiction.

Sometimes the prose is so powerful, I re-read the sentences a few times so I can feel the beauty and power a bit longer. Other times, the prose is a bit rushed, as if the author wants to get the facts out so he can get to the point where the story really moves.

Overall, it's a novel that takes reader into dark yet hopeful destinies.

Wandering Stars is the follow up to There There by author, Tommy Orange; a continuation of the generational trauma experienced by the Indigenous peoples first introduced in the previous novel.
The first part is a bit difficult to fully engage with the characters if you missed There There. Things move quickly and seemingly without a lot of explanation post the Sand Creek Massacre.

In the second part of the book, the reader will leap forward to current times and ultimately Oakland, CA where we find the remaining family of Opal and her grandsons and their awakening and questioning of their place in the world currently and from the beginning of time.

Thank you to Knopf Publishing and Netgalley for an early copy. All opinions are my own.

Tommy Orange's sophomore book follows on the heels of There There, but this time asking the questions of intergenerational trauma, of what we as a nation have forced our indigenous people to carry throughout generations, and the far-reaching impact that has.

We're once again introduced to a large cast of characters, some familiar, and once again all interconnected, either by meetings or blood. In looking to the past to the Indian Schools and the forced conversion and westernization of hundreds of tribes, we see how these wandering stars were forced to become wanderers in the first place and how that turned into a tapestry of both love and trauma, of a search for identity and belonging and the ways that manifests. In watching characters try and piece together a community and identity in the face of relentless attempts to erase them, we see, as Orange says, "[that] all Indians alive past the year 1900 are kinds of miracles.

The novel also deals with all of the ways various addictions surface and endure, not as a weakness of spirit, but as a way to lighten the burden of all these characters were forced to carry just by being born. Through a variety of narrators and narration styles, ranging from poetic to stream-of-consciousness, we get a sense of each character and their place in this tapestry of stars.

The writing in this book could not be any more beautiful. Highly recommend if you want to learn more about American history. It's a beautiful and heartbreaking story.

Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, received ecstatic reviews and major awards (American Book Award; Pen Hemingway award; finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize won by Richard Powers’ The Overstory).

I haven’t read that book. But when I saw that Net Galleys would give me the opportunity to read Tommy Orange’s next novel, I decided to go for it. I decided this even knowing that an advance starred review from Publisher’s Weekly said that the book “follows up . . . the first novel, 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.”

The new book helpfully provides a family tree of the Bear Shield-Red Feather family, so that as you meet the characters in the new book, you know exactly where you are in this multi-generational saga. This is crucial because the new book is not just multi-generational but also has multiple narrators.

First person: “And I wondered about American women. White women. Where are their hearts?”

Second person: “You will ask the librarian what novels are written by Indian people and she will tell you that she doesn’t think there are any. . . . Anything that came from your mother will be a kind of miracle, as all Indians alive past the year 1900 are kinds of miracles.”

Third person: “He felt then his body was a metaphor, human history some elaborate hoax, the world made against itself, split in half everywhere with its good and evil, love and hate, day and night, dream and waking, heaven and hell, Indians and men.”

I quote these sentences, that come early in the book, because I think they hint at what Orange does in telling his epic story in just a few hundred pages. He encapsulates the history and experience of 20th- and 21st- century Native Americans in the story of this family.

I won’t try to summarize the plot here. You can get that just by looking at any bookseller’s write-up of the book. And these write-ups will also tell you, even before the book’s publication, that it is already as highly praised as the previous one and probably will win major awards like that one.

And I will let more knowledgeable and literary-informed readers than I attest to the poetic quality and sometimes incantatory rhythms of Orange’s prose and the sense of urgency that pervades his narrative.

What I want to do, finally, is tell you the source of the title. The words “wandering stars” appear in two places early in the book. These words can also be found in the New Testament. First in the short epistle of Jude, where Jude describes the opponents of Christianity as "clouds without rain", "trees without fruit", "foaming waves of the sea", and "wandering stars."

“Wandering stars” also appears in the New Testament’s next and last book, The Book of Revelations, where there is a warning about people who are “Raging waves of the sea, foaming out of their own shame, wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever. “

Thus we understand why the opening pages of the story introduce us to Jude Star, the ancestor of the main characters in the book. And we learn to understand that all Native Americans are wandering stars, struggling to find a place in a culture dominated by the white Christians who stole their land and destroyed their identities.

I hope and expect this book will be discussed in every venue where books are written or talked about, and that it will be assigned (not banned!) in classrooms, quoted in sermons, and adapted for film or television.

A family saga of addiction.

In my review of Tommy Orange's here There I said, "I wish there had been half as many characters with their stories told over a longer span of time."

Well, Mr. Orange, THANK YOU!

Wandering Stars is exactly what I asked for, and it delivers in the HUGEST of ways. Not only is the story scoped down to just the Red Feather family, but it spans several generations and sticks to the central theme of addiction and historical pain First Nations people have somehow survived. That central idea is strong throughout the book. There wasn't one chapter or scene where I was wondering why it was there. All the words were important in the moment and space they held while also contributing to a singular thread of an idea, stitching the story together. I don't know how Orange managed to weave such a spell, but it was captivating.

I have to laugh because here's another line from my review of There There, "The one big weakness to There There is the lack of emotional or story resolution at the end." Wandering Stars has a perfect emotional and story resolution at the end. Again, I'm forced to wonder if Orange read my review and said to himself, "Mundinova, I'll write a book that's exactly what you're looking for." And he did.

There are a few things I have to call out as exceptional:
1) The language was poetic and accessible at the same time. There are word plays, double meanings, and repetitions that change context. It's a language nerd's dream come true.
2) The shifting third-person, first-person, and second-person narratives were genius! I loved how the change reflected the character's state at that moment in the story. There were times when the reader had to be psychically closer or farther from the character, and these transitions made that experience work.
3) This is the first book featuring drug addiction that captured the good feelings associated with using drugs in a way that I understood. I believed the characters when they said they'd rather be high because their descriptions of the feeling were so blissful that it was hard to believe anyone would want to live any other way.
4) The story takes place before and after <i>There There</i>, and I loved the summary distance the before scenes are written in as if we're hearing these stories said to us by a family member who may or may not know all the details. Then, once we're in the part of the story after the shooting, the reader is pulled in close so there's no way to look away.

This book will be one of the best of 2024. No doubts. I wish it all the success in the world and hope you love it, too.

Story: 5 stars
Character Development: 5 stars
Writing: 5 stars