Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date: February 27, 2024
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Cultural, Historical
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And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.
In the midst of the 1864 Colorado Sand Creek massacre of the Cheyenne a Native boy is able to escape. After years of wandering, he finds himself in Nevada where he’s told he can go to a mission for food and shelter. He does and is promptly chained and sent to a prison in Florida. It’s only years after his “rehabilitation” that he’s allowed to leave, with a proper Christian name. This is Jude Star, the point of origin for Tommy Orange’s new book, Wandering Stars. This novel is both a prequel and a sequel to Orange’s debut, There There in that it follows multiple generations of Star’s family leading up to the aftermath of the violence in There, There.
From Jude and his time in the prison Wandering Stars travels forward through his descendants as they struggle against a government that wants to erase their very nature. His son is sent to an Indian Residential School that is run by the same person who ran the prison. Orange doesn’t even need to look to his own imagination for this character, using instead the very real Richard Henry Pratt. A devout Christian, he coined the phrase, “kill the Indian, save the man” to summarize his belief that only by eradicating every single trace of Native American identity from their hair, clothes, rituals, language, and culture could an Indian become a member of civilized society. Using brutal physical and psychological violence to do so was no more than the cost of saving a soul. Jude encounters him in the prison and later his son, Charlie and his best friend, Opal, are sent to Pratt’s school in Pennsylvania.
Wandering Star drifts in the same way of its characters, who, without the bonds of family, shape shift in a country that wants to pretend they don’t exist. The trauma is embedded in the fibers of each successive generation, living rootless, tragic lives until, at the novel’s midpoint the past meets the present. Opal’s granddaughter is the aunt of Orvil Red-Feather, a teenager who is one of Jude’s descendants and a key character in There There. He lives with his aunt and three younger brothers as well as their mother who struggles with addiction. Orvil himself becomes addicted to painkillers. His story and that of his brothers, mother, and aunt comprise the second half of Wandering Stars as each deal with the fallout of Orvil’s situation.
In probing, gorgeous prose, Orange excavates the damage done to Native American culture through the lives of each of his characters. The family bonds that were arbitrarily broken by removal of children from their happy homes and the insidious impact of alcohol on a population that was stripped of its agency, way of life, and forced to live in desolate locations that made prosperity unlikely are felt on every page. The rootless nature that follows identity theft, when every trace of your heritage is either erased or appropriated.
On the one hand, Wandering Stars is riveting. On the other, it took me three weeks of starting and stopping to finish the novel. Orange goes so deep into the minds of his characters that I got lost in their universe. I could not keep the story or timeline or relationships straight. I marveled at the beauty of his writing, the strength of his prose, but the mental and emotional complexities he was sharing meant I lost track of the relationships and the momentum in the novel. Everything was vital to understanding his characters and the American history surrounding them, but the somber truths revealed are matched by the novel’s pace. My ability to stay immersed in events was inhibited, ultimately impacting my enjoyment of the novel. As painful as it is to admit, Wandering Stars was not as successful for me as I hoped it would be.
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*I received a free copy of this book from A.A. Knopf in exchange for an honest review.*
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