Wandering Stars
A Novel
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4.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize • Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal in Excellence for Fiction • 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, New York Times, NPR, Winnipeg Free Press, Barnes and Noble, The Guardian, and Indigo • One of Kobo CA's Top 20 Ebooks of 2024 and A Top Fiction Ebook 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
“Tommy Orange is a spectacular writer. That’s something you should have already heard,” says George Stroumboulopoulos about his newest book club pick. “This is storytelling that grips you from the very beginning. And it doesn’t relent, period. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve read all year.” A sequel of sorts to Tommy Orange’s astonishing debut novel, There There, Wandering Stars spins a compelling family drama across multiple generations, mixing historical fiction with plainspoken poetry and some very personal stories. In the 1860s, Jude Star survives the Sand Creek Massacre—where the U.S. Army killed hundreds of Native Americans—only to be shipped to a Florida prison. There, a villainous young guard named Richard Henry Pratt systematically forces the ways of white men on Star’s people. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is demeaned and abused at a school founded by Pratt. In the present day, Jude and Charles’ descendants are still struggling with racism, generational trauma, and addiction. Orange achieves a gorgeous, organic, and lyrical flow of language throughout this powerful novel. Wandering Stars doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrors Native Americans have experienced, but across the generations, it never stops celebrating these characters’ indomitable spirits. Despite being fiction, Wandering Stars provides many harsh history lessons—but the story kept us intensely absorbed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Orange follows up his PEN/Hemingway-winning There There 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. Those ancestors include Jude Star, who barely survives the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in what is now Colorado as a youth and is sent to a prison in St. Augustine, Fla., where he's forced to learn English and read the Bible. Jude later works as a farmhand in Oklahoma and raises his son Charles, who is sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. As a young man in the early 1900s, Charles drifts into San Francisco, where he becomes addicted to morphine while contending with the trauma of forced assimilation and unspecified abuse at Carlisle ("There is something deeper down, doing its dark work on him some further forgotten thing, but what is it? His life is about knowing it is there but not ever wanting to see it"). In the present, high school freshman Orvil Red Feather recovers at home in Oakland after being struck by a stray bullet during the powwow. Like Charles, he becomes addicted to opiates and struggles to connect with his cultural identity after his grandmother neglects to share details about their Cheyenne heritage. 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.
