Wandering Stars: A novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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.
"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 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.
"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 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.
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Community Reviews
Wandering Star was such an enlightening book. The story of the Bear Shield-Red Feather family, shows strength, will and endurance. At the same time, heartbreaking, as we would never hear these stories in a classroom.
We meet Jude Star in 1864 in Colorado. His family and people were killed and brutalized in the Sand Creek Massacre. The Sand Creek was a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U.S. Army. When a 675-man force of the Third Colorado Cavalry under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 600 Native American people. Chivington claimed 500 to 600 warriors were killed, about two-thirds of whom were women and children. He and another young man survived this attack and now are having to figure out what to do next. This is when he and his friend are taken to Fort Marion Prison Castle. Here Star if forced to forget his indigenous beliefs, traditions and language. Instead they are forced to learn English and practice Christianity.
When Star is finally able to leaves the Fort Marion Prison Castle in Florida. We see how he navigates life on his own and how he now sees the world.
This was a great book. I would recommend this to any reader. You don’t have to be a historical fiction reader to get so much out of this book. This writing was so poetic and has such a beautiful quality that it will keep you glued to the pages. It is a multigenerational work that spans centuries and shows us the lasting scares that are passed down to each person.
We meet Jude Star in 1864 in Colorado. His family and people were killed and brutalized in the Sand Creek Massacre. The Sand Creek was a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U.S. Army. When a 675-man force of the Third Colorado Cavalry under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 600 Native American people. Chivington claimed 500 to 600 warriors were killed, about two-thirds of whom were women and children. He and another young man survived this attack and now are having to figure out what to do next. This is when he and his friend are taken to Fort Marion Prison Castle. Here Star if forced to forget his indigenous beliefs, traditions and language. Instead they are forced to learn English and practice Christianity.
When Star is finally able to leaves the Fort Marion Prison Castle in Florida. We see how he navigates life on his own and how he now sees the world.
This was a great book. I would recommend this to any reader. You don’t have to be a historical fiction reader to get so much out of this book. This writing was so poetic and has such a beautiful quality that it will keep you glued to the pages. It is a multigenerational work that spans centuries and shows us the lasting scares that are passed down to each person.
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.
“A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you.”
From the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to the present day gun violence and opioid epidemic, Tommy Orange traces the Redfeather family tree and reveals how each generation’s trauma feeds the next.
Passages in this beautifully written recounting of Native American trauma - filled with the wrongs of white men and women - made me stop in awe, so heartbreaking in their truth. So plain in their understanding of survival, loss, longing, and hopelessness. Passages like:
“I'd taken an idea about second wind for myself. That if you could last through what seemed hardest, you got more, and that there lived somewhere in the body the ability to keep going even though it felt like you no longer could, some reserve of strength and power, to endure, that took its share but not all of you; that you could save some part of you, hidden away in a true place, even from yourself, for when you needed it most—to believe in that felt powerful enough to make it true.”
“You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. In lives behind you. It's there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I'm not there.”
“Selfish is the most likely thing to become if you've been abandoned, I think. Being abandoned means you don't think anyone else is really there for you when it comes down to it. So it's just you. Yourself. Being how you would be if there was no one else there.”
Told from the perspective of several generations, Wandering Stars stacks personal histories like stones in a cairn, leaving you with a monument to each experience so that you will never forget.
From the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to the present day gun violence and opioid epidemic, Tommy Orange traces the Redfeather family tree and reveals how each generation’s trauma feeds the next.
Passages in this beautifully written recounting of Native American trauma - filled with the wrongs of white men and women - made me stop in awe, so heartbreaking in their truth. So plain in their understanding of survival, loss, longing, and hopelessness. Passages like:
“I'd taken an idea about second wind for myself. That if you could last through what seemed hardest, you got more, and that there lived somewhere in the body the ability to keep going even though it felt like you no longer could, some reserve of strength and power, to endure, that took its share but not all of you; that you could save some part of you, hidden away in a true place, even from yourself, for when you needed it most—to believe in that felt powerful enough to make it true.”
“You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. In lives behind you. It's there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I'm not there.”
“Selfish is the most likely thing to become if you've been abandoned, I think. Being abandoned means you don't think anyone else is really there for you when it comes down to it. So it's just you. Yourself. Being how you would be if there was no one else there.”
Told from the perspective of several generations, Wandering Stars stacks personal histories like stones in a cairn, leaving you with a monument to each experience so that you will never forget.
The word “wandering” does belong in this novel’s title, given how much the story wanders about, flitting from one character to another without giving us a chance to really know anyone. More of a dry manifesto than a story packed with emotional tension. This novel about past traumas and present addiction tackles important themes but does so in a way that’s more preachy than heartwrenching. Sadly, it’s a story we will forget far too easily.
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