Reviews with content warning for Child death - There There

Reviews tagging 'Child death'

There There by Tommy Orange

53 reviews

sydapel's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

One of those books that will just haunt you in a way that feels both comforting but leaves a deep ache. Even with a tragedy you can see slowly approaching, it's the characters that grab onto you and leave you thinking long after you've finished the book. These characters will deeply change the way you think about indigenous people in America and what as a culture they have been through. Definitely check trigger warnings but this is not one to skip.

Content Warnings

chaosandwildflowers's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

The idea of this book is so phenomenal; it's a character study focused on the diverse range of life experiences within the Native American community, while simultaneously drawing attention to the fact that a growing number of Native Americans now live in cities - not on reservations. It explores various themes, including self-discovery, identity, self-loathing, heritage, parental expectations, toxic/abusive relationships, forgiveness, etc etc etc. The book also tells different character perspectives in different styles, including every thing from first to second to third person POVs, past and present verb tenses, and various other tone shifts used to distinguish characters from one another.

One of Tommy Orange's greatest strengths is in his writing and his understanding of the human psyche. The writing truly is beautiful, even feeling poetic in some places, and though the cast of characters is vast, he takes time to explore each of them in at least a little bit of depth.

However, I do think the book tried to do too much in too little space. Some characters feel extremely similar, making their chapters feel repetitive, and the sheer number of characters made it difficult to really delve into more than a few of them. I believe this book should have either streamlined its plot to fit the space or allowed itself more pages to really explore the themes. I also felt like the story ended very abruptly, with a few loose ends and unexplained plot points.

Overall, I would absolutely recommend this book. Hard stop. I think it's important to read, especially in our current society. But I'd also suggest that readers go into it expecting to focus more on the characters than on an extremely coherent plot. Solid 3/5 stars!

Content Warnings

faduma's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Content Warnings

sickee26's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Content Warnings

bisexualwentworth's review against another edition

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Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

There There is the story of twelve indigenous people who end up at a powwow in Oakland, California. It traces their lives and their struggles and their relationships with each other in a gorgeously non-linear way.

There are so many interesting and experimental things going on in this book. There’s definitely a whole capstone paper about indigenous temporarily here. There’s a lot of interesting ruminations on Native identity and urban Native identity in particular (and I’m sure I missed a lot more as a white reader).

This is the first piece of long-form fiction that I’ve ever seen successfully incorporate first, second, AND third person point of view chapters as well as both present and past tense sections interspersed throughout the book (see earlier point about non-linear storytelling).

I read There There this week because it’s the Great Read at the library where I work and therefore kind of the book of the moment in my town. Tommy Orange is doing an author event that I tragically won’t be able to attend. It’s all very cool and I’m glad it got me to read this book!

I didn’t totally love this one, though. Some of the characters felt a bit too similar. The women in particular were all defined by sexual violence in one way or another, and while I know that it’s really important to talk about the horrible amounts of sexual violence faced by Native women, I wish that there had been more variety of women’s stories in this book. Maybe that’s unreasonable to expect from a cis man author. I don’t know.

Also, why did I think that Tommy Orange was queer? I’m pretty sure he’s not and the book is incredibly cishet, so I’m not sure where that idea came from. Oh well.

Please look at the very extensive list of content warnings if you have any of the major triggers. This book contains most of them.

Content Warnings