Reviews for Wandering stars
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Orange's second novel is both prequel and sequel to the striking There, There (2018) and a centuries-spanning novel that stands firmly on its own. Once again featuring several narrator-characters, it opens during "America's longest war"—the 313 years of settlers' brutal attempts to annihilate the Native people who preceded them. The boy who will become Jude Star wakes to the sound of his camp's massacre, and escapes. In 1875, he's taken from Oklahoma to a "prison-castle" on the Florida coast; his jailer will one day teach his son at the Carlisle Indian School. We continue to meet Jude's inheritors (the provided family tree is key) and then it is 2018, and Jude's teenage great-great-great grandson Orvil is recovering from the climactic events of There There. Orvil's wicked pain, and increasing need for medication to numb it, lead to Sean, recuperating from injury himself, who has access to homemade painkillers. Orvil's grandmothers and brothers have struggles of their own. All this barely scratches the surface of Orange's tender yet eviscerating history of a family's survival—day to day, generation to generation—and their uneasy yet persistent belief in that survival. Their story, one character realizes, "has to be lived in order to be told, it is the song being sung, the dancer in midair," and, indeed, there is so much life in this mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic novel.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: There, There was a lauded best-seller and readers will be thrilled to see anything from Orange, especially a continuation of that beloved story.
Library Journal
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This follow-up to Orange's debut novel, There There, delivers a considerably different reading experience than its progenitor. Moving away from that earlier novel's vast, intricately woven tapestry of interconnections, Orange narrows his focus to the lineage and immediate family of There There's Orvil Red Feather, beginning with his great-great-great-grandfather in the 1800s and continuing until 2018, where most of the narrative takes place, examining the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. But it isn't just the novel's construction that changes shape. Orange forgoes the explosive tragedy that punctuated his first novel and instead documents its lingering distension. It's a potent and intimate pivot, one that builds in power as he mines the abiding grief of childhood's passage, particularly within the contexts of Indigenous history and contemporaneity. This second work lacks the sense of sprawl that invigorated Orange's debut, and there are stretches in the central section that can feel pulled too thin and blunted by repetition, leaving its three parts a bit wobbly in balance. But, as was the case with There There, he builds to a memorable crescendo. VERDICT Orange smartly avoids the trap of attempting the same trick twice, tweaking his approach to story and structure and once again showcasing his ability to deliver characters with clear, complex interiority.—Luke Gorham
Publishers Weekly
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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. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi, Inc. (Mar.)
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
A lyrical, multigenerational exploration of Native American oppression. Orange’s second novel is partly a sequel to his acclaimed 2018 debut, There There—its second half centers on members of the Red Feather family after the events of the first book. But Orange moves the story back as well as forward. He rewinds to 1864’s Sand Creek Massacre, in which Natives were killed or displaced by the U.S. Army. One survivor (and Red Feather family ancestor), Jude Star, is a mute man imprisoned and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of several institutions designed to strip Native Americans of their history and folklore. As Orange tracks the generations that follow, he suggests that such schools did their jobs well, but imperfectly—essential traces of Native heritage endure despite decades of murder, poverty, and addiction. That theme crystallizes as the story shifts to 2018, depicting Orvil Red Feather’s struggles after he was shot at a powwow in Oakland, California. His path is perilous, especially thanks to a school friend with easy access to addictive pain medications. But Orvil doesn’t quite lose his grip on history, whether that’s through stories of his mother participating in the 19-month Native American occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971, or cowboys-and-Indians lore he contemplates while playing Red Dead Redemption 2. “Everyone only thinks we’re from the past, but then we’re here, but they don’t know we’re still here,” as Orvil’s brother Lony puts it. 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. And the timbre of individual voices is richer, from Orvil’s streetwise patter to the officiousness of Carlisle founder Richard Henry Pratt, determined to send “the vanishing race off into final captivity before disappearing into history forever.” He failed, but this is a powerful indictment of his—and America’s—efforts. A searing study of the consequences of a genocide. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
