Tommy Orange became a literary sensation when his debut novel, There, There, was published in 2018. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and national best seller, the book was lauded by readers everywhere, and people have been waiting for his follow-up with eager anticipation.
Safe to say, Wandering Stars does not disappoint. Orange is a born storyteller, and the tales he has to tell in this book will stay with you for a very long time. It is a difficult, beautiful book. Anyone who enjoyed our discussion of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song a couple of months ago will find much to be engaged with here.
Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez, said about it: “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.”
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.
In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to bethe children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.
