Wandering Stars
| Item Information | |
|---|---|
| Item#: | 9780771050367 |
| Author | Orange, Tommy |
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize • A New York Times Editors’ Choice • An NPR Book of the Day • Named a Best Book of 2024 (So Far) by the New York Times, Esquire, Vulture, W Magazine, Indigo, Audible, and Barnes & Noble • One of Oprah Daily’s Best New Novels to Read in Spring 2024 • An Audacious Book Club Pick • Named a Most Anticipated Book by TIME, Real Simple, Oprah Daily, Vulture, NPR, and The Millions • One of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2024
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 Ten Best Books of the Year—Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather’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 Industrial School for Indians, 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 bloodline.
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 which 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.
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 Ten Best Books of the Year—Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather’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 Industrial School for Indians, 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 bloodline.
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 which 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 Quotes
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize • A New York Times Editors’ Choice • An NPR Book of the Day • Named a Best Book of 2024 (So Far) by the New York Times, Esquire, Vulture, W Magazine, Indigo, Audible, and Barnes & Noble • One of Oprah Daily’s Best New Novels to Read in Spring 2024 • An Audacious Book Club Pick • Named a Most Anticipated Book by TIME, Real Simple, Oprah Daily, Vulture, NPR, and The Millions • Named a Best Book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews
“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.”
—New York Times
"A searing study of the consequences of genocide."
—Kirkus Reviews
“An emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel. . . . Orange’s achievement . . . lies in his ability to distil the deep wounds of history into intimate episodes and slices of memory that come vividly and painfully alive, as though they were happening now, in the present. . . . Orange gives the reader a clear, shattering sense of the racist ideas that once enthralled white America, and the means, both mundane and pseudoscientific, through which it pursued its accursed ambitions. . . . Orange’s work feels, to me, as vital as air.”
—Yagnishsing Dawoor, The Guardian (Book of the Day)
“[This] tapestry of colonial trauma is harrowing yet healing. . . . a novel marrying eye-opening historical re-creation with gritty social realism.”
—Anthony Cummins, The Observer
“A powerful, multi-voiced account of suffering and survival across the generations. . . . thrillingly expansive, restless second novel. . . . Orange is concerned with the reverberations of tragedy, and the need to create communities out of fractured social realities. The inheritance of grief illuminates Wandering Stars—the burden and balm of personal histories, and the fact of white Americans’ genocide against the country’s own people.”
—Hermione Hoby, Financial Times
“In this wrenching story about the legacy of colonial violence, we see generations of Native characters orphaned from their past. Through poignant resonances between then and now, Orange delivers an epic saga of generational trauma, devastating to behold and impossible to put down.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“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.” —Boston Globe
“A multilayered, blisteringly honest novel . . . [Wandering Stars] undeniably soars.”
—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.”
—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
“A devastating account of forced assimilation, the search for cultural identity, and the ravages of addiction, told through the shifting perspectives of Orange’s layered, wounded characters. An essential purchase.”
—Sarah Hashimoto, Library Journal
“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. . . asking what it means to be the 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.”
—Lakota Times
“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)
“Tommy Orange has once again captured the essence of human endurance….As we close the pages of [his] latest masterpiece, we're left with a profound sense of connection—to the past, to each other, and to the stories that define us.”
—BNN
“[From] Orange’s sensitive depiction of Orvil’s path to recovery to the chronicling of important, overlooked moments in the brutal history of America’s treatment of its Indigenous people….Wandering Stars is an impassioned censure of…marginalization.”
—BookPage
“It’s impossible to read Wandering Stars and not think about our relationship to this stolen land….This is a book that will change you.”
—KQED
“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.”
—New York Times
"A searing study of the consequences of genocide."
—Kirkus Reviews
“An emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel. . . . Orange’s achievement . . . lies in his ability to distil the deep wounds of history into intimate episodes and slices of memory that come vividly and painfully alive, as though they were happening now, in the present. . . . Orange gives the reader a clear, shattering sense of the racist ideas that once enthralled white America, and the means, both mundane and pseudoscientific, through which it pursued its accursed ambitions. . . . Orange’s work feels, to me, as vital as air.”
—Yagnishsing Dawoor, The Guardian (Book of the Day)
“[This] tapestry of colonial trauma is harrowing yet healing. . . . a novel marrying eye-opening historical re-creation with gritty social realism.”
—Anthony Cummins, The Observer
“A powerful, multi-voiced account of suffering and survival across the generations. . . . thrillingly expansive, restless second novel. . . . Orange is concerned with the reverberations of tragedy, and the need to create communities out of fractured social realities. The inheritance of grief illuminates Wandering Stars—the burden and balm of personal histories, and the fact of white Americans’ genocide against the country’s own people.”
—Hermione Hoby, Financial Times
“In this wrenching story about the legacy of colonial violence, we see generations of Native characters orphaned from their past. Through poignant resonances between then and now, Orange delivers an epic saga of generational trauma, devastating to behold and impossible to put down.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“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.” —Boston Globe
“A multilayered, blisteringly honest novel . . . [Wandering Stars] undeniably soars.”
—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.”
—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
“A devastating account of forced assimilation, the search for cultural identity, and the ravages of addiction, told through the shifting perspectives of Orange’s layered, wounded characters. An essential purchase.”
—Sarah Hashimoto, Library Journal
“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. . . asking what it means to be the 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.”
—Lakota Times
“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)
“Tommy Orange has once again captured the essence of human endurance….As we close the pages of [his] latest masterpiece, we're left with a profound sense of connection—to the past, to each other, and to the stories that define us.”
—BNN
“[From] Orange’s sensitive depiction of Orvil’s path to recovery to the chronicling of important, overlooked moments in the brutal history of America’s treatment of its Indigenous people….Wandering Stars is an impassioned censure of…marginalization.”
—BookPage
“It’s impossible to read Wandering Stars and not think about our relationship to this stolen land….This is a book that will change you.”
—KQED