I was excited to see this book by this author. Certainly not a happy tale, but a well-written and compelling one. His previous book was great as well.

I really appreciate the free copy for review!

This plot is the genelogy of an Indian/Native American family. The description of the very difficult life they endoured was riviting. It's easy to understand how the resulting family issues occur.

Wandering Stars tells the separate stories of the Star family separately. Each character has a chance to relate their story to the reader, but not to the generation that comes after them. I found the early stories to be the most interesting and compelling. Each generation grapples with what being Native means for them in the context of a white United States and each generation faces different challenges and repercussions from the trauma of earlier generations. I did not read Tommy Orange's earlier work, although I meant to. I think this is a book that will be around for awhile and it does a good job at looking at many of the impacts of being a Native American today.

A must read for anyone trying to understand current problems in Native American communities. A powerful look at the generational trauma that exists for many Indigenous families. This book gives readers an intimate view into addiction, feelings of isolation in a colonized world and fear of never being enough. It explores why love is often not enough to break through the trauma.

Tommy Orange always writes with such raw, intense emotion and sometimes that feels daunting, but with this book I was enraptured. I couldn't put it down even if I wanted to.

The emotions I felt reading Wandering Stars were intense and every word felt like it left a deeper cut in my heart -- but i'm better for it.

Addiction is a beast of a thing and to write about it in such a poetic but real way is a talent and I look forward to reading this again when it officially releases. Incredible work, truly. I'm recovering from sobbing as I write this

Beautiful and tragic story that follows the characters from the previous book "There, There" and goes back generations to paint a picture of the generational trauma and addiction that affect the Star family and continue to the present time. The book is hard to read at times and Orange has a very unique voice in that his writing is poetic in nature but also remote. Tommy Orange is an important voice in the Native American experience and it is clear he has done extensive research into the facts that are woven into this fictional story. This is a storyteller telling a tale through various viewpoints and types of narration. In this book we get stories told in first, second and third narration, but it all comes together like a layered mosaic, to give us a picture of how this family struggles and survives.

The book begins in 1864 with the Sand Creek Massacre, then follows young Charles Star as he is enrolled in the Carlisle School, a school where Indian students were stripped of everything that they knew about being Native American and beaten and starved into submission. Within this framework, each generation has original characters who have their own strengths and weaknesses as they struggle with addiction, births and deaths and trying to maintain a sense of belonging. The last chapters circle back to Orville from "There, There" who is recovering from his injuries after being shot and who battles to find his place in the world along with his younger brothers and grandmothers. A great book and I look forward to reading more fiction from this talented author. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this ARC in exchange for a review.

So-I think it helps to have read his first book-THERE THERE-a superb read. The first part of the read follows a survivor of the Sand Creek massacre and his life and lineage. To me this was the most powerful part of the book. The second part follows his descendants living in Oakland, each using a different method for coping with being s modern day Native American.
It was for me just okay-not nearly as powerful as his first book,and at times in the second half too wordy and not cohesive enough( except for one chapter that you’ll have to read to discover).
In summary -a good effort but not as powerful as his first book.

4.5, rounding up because the prose is so, so good. Every couple of pages I was just knocked down by a paragraph and had to take a few minutes to reread and breathe. This is the story of the Red Feather family from 1875 to the near future, continuing and deepening their narrative from There There and landing hard on the three young brothers Orvil, Loother, and Lony. It's unbearably sad and at times depressing, except that they do manage to hang on to each other and to their shared, damned past throughout the worst. Substance addiction is a major theme, handled with incredible sad clarity and compassion, as is the related problem of dealing with the weight of a personal and generational history that's just too much for anyone to bear sanely.

You'll probably want to reread or at least skim There There before starting this one, as there are a few important events in the first book that are frequently referred to here.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.

I think Tommy Orange and I just do not mesh. I felt like the only person in 2019 who read and did not like THERE THERE, but because I study contemporary Indigenous fiction, I wanted to like Orange's new book very badly. Unfortunately, I found this just as messy and inconsistent as his debut. This does not seem to be marketed as a sequel to THERE THERE, but it definitely is. I had to skim through the older book to remember certain plot points and character relationships. Orange's debut felt like the worst kind of kitchen-sink novel to me, and I felt the same about this one. It is a story about addiction, Native boarding schools, PTSD, Sand Creek, liberalism, and brotherhood all at once, far too much to be properly elaborated on in a single text. On top of being a sequel, the character work and structure of this was just all over the place. From a large-scale textual level to line-by-line prose level, I found this novel very frustrating. If you were a massive fan of THERE THERE, I think you will appreciate this continuation of the story. I just could not be converted into a Tommy Orange fan with this new novel.

I can’t wait for everyone to get their hands on this one. If Tommy Orange knows how to do one thing it’s how to make the most tragic story sound so beautiful. This is a follow up to There There (one of my favorite books) and it deals so well with the history of Native Americans in the United States and the hardships they’ve faced time and time again — from massacres to reform schools and how that trauma has been passed down from generation to generation. I really couldn’t put this one down and I just kept reading sentences over and over again because it was so good. My favorite sentence here: “We’ll have strong legs, keen awareness, and big hearts, keeping ourselves and each other going like we belong to that one-day distant future, when we can look back and say this is how we made it, despite everything.” I really enjoyed the historical aspect of this and how Tommy blended in key historical events into the narrative to show they altered the course of the characters lives. I wish in the second half we would've delved a bit more into Loother's story but overall I really enjoyed this book!

What I liked: the opening of the book and its depiction of the enormous, horrendous suffering and abuse of the Native Indian people, their animals and way of life; and the maintenance of these themes of loss, pain, yearning and searching the whole book through
What worked less well for me: the baggy shapelessness of much of the rest, apart from the final section. Circular, often low on narrative content, this tracing of multiple characters, while telling and effective, also remained static and repetitive.
Nevertheless, I was aware right the way through of the visceral strength of the book’s intent, and the immediacy of the writing. Orange’s work is important, memorable. It made its mark.

4.5 stars rounded up. Author Tommy Orange writes in such a way that you are’t merely reading about the characters as a passive observer - you are the characters and feel the weight of their emotions in the kernel of your soul. His voice, cadence, and rhythm is uniquely his and reads like the stories our elders tell us or like the heavy moments exchanged between friends when we let down our walls. This novel captures a much-needed diverse intergenerational portrait of what it means to be Native in America and reminds us that the people who survived an ongoing genocide are still living among us and grappling with the outcomes.

Whereas the first book in the series, There There, focused on the story of the modern, urban children, Wondering Stars goes back, following the family tree of those in the first book. It follows from the beginnings of colonization’s erasure, assimilation, and violence on the family as they experience the Sand Creek Massacre, the Fort Marion Prison Castle, and the Carlisle Indian School. This added history interplays with the modern characters from the first novel as they each individually grapple with the outcome of the Powwow shooting. As the story progresses, the years on years of trauma inflicted on the family feels ceaseless and you come away with a greater understanding of how our country never atoned for its wrongs against its first inhabitants, even while we continue to perpetuate them.

While each character’s individual story is gripping in their own right, Tommy Orange - master crafter that he is - weaves a tapestry from each that captures the breadth of the Native experience in a way that is more tragically poignant than the the sum of the individual stories. In this way, I think it can be categorized alongside Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

This novel is perfect for anyone seeking out Native voices, those interested in introspective and emotional writing, and those interested in important societal questions. The writing gets into stream of consciousness at times, but give yourself the chance to hold on and give it a chance and I think you’ll find something beautiful, tragic, and unique in forging its own path.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for providing me with a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Someone told me to read “There, There” first. I liked the writing style of chapter 1, so I’m going to come back to this one after reading his first book. (And that said, I don't feel like I need to read the first to get into this one.)

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC.

"Wandering Stars" by Tommy Orange, a masterful follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-finalist novel "There There," weaves a powerful narrative that extends across the past and future, tracing the legacies of historical atrocities and their impact on generations of a family.

The story begins in Colorado in 1864, where Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle. Here, he is subjected to the efforts of Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard, to erase his Native identity through the imposition of English language and Christianity. Pratt will later establish the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, dedicated to eradicating Native history and culture. A generation later, Star's son Charles becomes a victim of this institution, suffering under the harsh treatment of the man who once guarded his father.

The narrative then shifts to Oakland in 2018, where Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is struggling to hold her family together after her nephew Orvil survives a shooting. Orvil, grappling with the trauma, becomes obsessed with school shootings, while his brother Lony copes with PTSD through self-harm and rituals connecting him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal, seeking healing for her family, explores Ceremony and peyote.

Tommy Orange's storytelling is described as piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage. "Wandering Stars" stands as a devastating indictment of America's historical and ongoing mistreatment of its own people, offering a profound exploration of identity, trauma, and the intergenerational impacts of systemic violence.

This novel follows the Star family through the generations, starting in the 1800s and springing into the 2000s.

It was hard to get my footing at first in this novel, but once I found it, wow. This is a story that flows so smartly through Native American family history and multiple points of view. With each character living through their own trauma, Orange manages to seamlessly bring each story together, allowing each generational trauma to meld into one another. What an absolutely gut-wrenching yet beautifully written novel.

Addiction, violence, heartache. These are just a few things you’ll find in this breathtaking follow-up to “There There.”

Orange’s prose is magical, to say the least. This is definitely going back in my “read again“ pile.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wandering Stars is a clear-eyed, unvarnished story of violence, addiction, and generational trauma that stem from the cultural erasure intended by US policy towards indigenous tribes since forever. While it helps to have read There, There, first, this provides the most pertinent details from that book's conclusion: namely, Orvil's near-fatal shooting at the Oakland powwow. But this is jumping the gun. Wandering Stars begins at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, where one of Orvil's ancestors survived, only to be caught in trap of the US's all-out effort to de-Indian the Indians. With each subsequent generation's struggles illustrated, the line from the past to the present could not be more clear, and without saying so, makes a powerful argument for any and all restitution, beginning with the most elementary available to us (land acknowledgements, etc). History and politics aside, though, by the time the author arrives at the present day and Orvil & Co, it is also a deeply empathetic family portrait.
I especially appreciated reading this in this moment, as I think Native representation in media has evolved noticeably since There, There came out. The contrast alone between Reservation Dogs (excellent!!) and Killers of the Flower Moon (controversial) says so much. This book feels like a natural companion to the former (although not comedic) and contributes more grist to the argument for Own Voices in relating history.

OKAY OUCH. I am just utterly speechless with bittersweet joy and love for this book. I fell out of my chair when I got a physical ARC of one of my highly anticipated reads, and it didn't disappoint. I loved Tommy Orange's There There, and this was the perfect leg up on its literary predecessor to further paint a picture of how native Americans and Indigenous groups have been wrongly treated and pushed out over the centuries. Wandering Stars follows one family line through decades of trauma, bloodshed, war, loss, and addiction, detailing the inner threads of this family tree.

We start at the Sand Creek massacre in the mid-1800s and follow narratives down to the present day, where one family (Star and then Red Feather) finds themselves in terribly horrific situations such as bloody killings, State Boarding Schools, racism, addictions, and persecuted by old white men and perpetrators, robbing them of their land, rights, and well-being through a vicious historical cycle.

Tommy Orange is such a magnificent orator within historically accurate stories, and I am amazed by his ability to bring me to tears. I am so sorry on behalf of all the stupidity that this nation has struck upon its original inhabitants all those years ago and continues to do with each waking present day on this cyclical hellhole of a timeline. We can't let history repeat itself; we must stand up, take action, and give the land back where it's due. Freedom for one means freedom for ALL!

I am so thankful to Knopf Books, Tommy Orange, and Netgalley for granting me digital and physical access before this powerful piece hits shelves on February 27, 2024.

This book was intense. It follows the Star family and several members of it. It does switch between first and third person which threw me off at first. It’s about the generational trauma and cycle of addiction. It’s about family and love and found family. It’s about sadness and joy. It’s a beautiful book and I really liked it. Well written, haunting, and poignant.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

So beautiful and tragic multi-generational story and the love of heritage and tragedy that occurs in every generation. Tommy’s writing is so beautiful and weighs heavily on the soul It’s nice to see more native authors coming forward to learn from. Five glorious heartbreaking stars.

With his distinct writing style characterized with a poetic rawness, Tommy Orange crafts a narrative that begins with the Sand Creek Massacre and then proceeds to follow an indigenous family through several generations Along the way, he captures the systematic violence and historical trauma inflicted upon the nation’s native peoples on a deeply intimate level. Once the plot settles in the modern day upon a cast of characters that we first became acquainted with in “There, There” the larger aforementioned themes then begin to become closely intertwined with themes of facing the effects of personal trauma that can occur as just a facet of life. The book in turn becomes something that is both very uniquely Native American at its core, but also a work that is intensely, if not almost painfully, relatable for those of us who at some point in our lives have found ourselves trying to manage a dark stretch. All of the above, plus more, makes for a magnificent complexity, and an honest ferocity that has honestly blown me away.

For those who have been patiently (or perhaps impatiently) anticipating Orange’s next work for the last several years, I want to say that the wait has been incredibly well worth it.
Wandering Stars" is definitely one of my favorite fiction reads of 2023.