Wandering Stars: A novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There ("Pure soaring beauty."The New York Times Book Review) delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "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, bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez 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.
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Community Reviews
Well written, glad to have read this book to learn more about how Indigenous people have been treated in America, and especially how it has affected them then and now.
This prequel (and sequel) to There, There is heartbreaking, moving, and inspiring. It was one of my more anticipated releases of the year and it did not disappoint.
The deliberate stripping of Native American identity and culture is not that kind of situation discussed in Martin Puchner’s illuminating book about the heterogeneity of culture—the notion that given cultures are not freshly sprouted and unadulterated stock. Rather, culture as we use the term is a mixed bag of borrowing or imposing culture systems through invasion and colonization or simply the normal blending that results from mass migrations and resettlements.
In this story, the cultural stripping is not being done by a foreign power. It is not a thing of centuries past in some distant and mysterious world. Rather, it is an instance of one group of Americans—who it might be noted hold the entire stock of hard and soft power—deciding its culture is superior to that of another American group. The story that unfolds in this book is about generational trauma and the challenge of thriving as forced adoptees of a transplant culture. It is about today’s world and should serve as a reminder that it is naïve and dangerous to force one’s view of the world on another’s agency.
Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for providing this eARC.
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