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mandaant1's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
They were losing their identities on how to be a native and what is a native. They were being adopted into white homes and did not know where they came from. Some were half white/half native and did not know what to identify as. I believe this to be a true struggle.
The last generation was affected the most by the opium epidemic. Orvil being shot at the pow wow (Read There, There for the back story).
Everyone in this story was going through their own trauma and were trying to cope with it on their own.
Moderate: Alcohol, Alcoholism, Addiction, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Drug use, and Drug abuse
Minor: Cancer
brittyreadsbooks's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
5.0
Moderate: Self harm and Addiction
kellkie's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the eARC.
Moderate: Drug abuse, Suicide, Death of parent, Self harm, Addiction, and Alcoholism
ktdakotareads's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.5
Graphic: Alcoholism, Death, Drug use, Grief, Cancer, Classism, Suicidal thoughts, Confinement, Abandonment, Colonisation, Cultural appropriation, Self harm, Toxic friendship, Drug abuse, Racism, Addiction, and Blood
Minor: Mass/school shootings and Gun violence
caseythereader's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
- I knew Orange would break my heart with WANDERING STARS, and he sure did.
- Orange expands on the legacy of colonization and the generational traumas that stem from it, showing different ways they manifested throughout the decades.
- Orange’s writing is so gorgeous, the kind of writing that you can’t imagine being done any other way.
- I reread THERE THERE immediately before this one, and am happy to report that the anti-fat bias in the first book is almost entirely gone.
Graphic: Abandonment, Alcoholism, Blood, Colonisation, Cursing, Medical content, Addiction, Drug use, Alcohol, Death, Genocide, Suicidal thoughts, Death of parent, Grief, Gun violence, Self harm, Injury/Injury detail, Cancer, Mass/school shootings, Animal death, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Racism, Suicide, and Violence
Moderate: Rape
bookishmillennial's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc, I'm providing an honest review of my own accord <3
"The word family will never feel the same as it once did, or maybe it never quite fit. Like we need new words for what we become, how much we change, how we wear words and names out, especially when your heart breaks about going from being a kid to being an adult because you have to, because the world isn't made for kids."
At first, I was nervous about this falling into the same issues I encountered when reading There, There, and though I think others may feel differently, I really enjoyed this follow up and think TO's writing has only improved (who am I, I'm a peasant, but I adored his prose and I personally appreciate a bit of heavy-handedness so whatever!) and drew me in even more with this sequel.
The narratives that pulled me in the most were those of Sean Price, an adoptee living in Oakland with his white family, and Orvil Red Feather, who we revisit in the aftermath of his school shooting, and he meets Sean via the world wide internet! I was so intrigued by Sean's journey of discovering his ethnicity through 23andMe, and learning he was part indigenous (but unfortunately does not know which tribe), part Black, and part white. He grew up with a white family, and once he finds out his background, he begins to question and challenge so much about his family and society as a whole.
I think the reason that narrative stood out to me was because of my own bias, since I live in the SF Bay Area and the following the narrative of someone in 2018 in Oakland felt familiar to read about. Though there are a multiple people we follow in this book, I didn't feel it was too hard to follow because we had met some of them in There, There, and I had a better handle on the family tree this time around.
Overall, the underlying themes of addiction, colonization, and familial generational trauma were clearly a bit grim, but ultimately it was powerful (in quiet, validating sort of way for me) and provided direct and tough commentary.
Quotations that stood out to me
Everything that happens to a tribe happens to everyone in the tribe. Good and bad. Their mom said that once. But then she said now that we're so spread out, lost to each other, it's not the same, except that it's the same in our families, everything that happens to you once you make a family, it happens to all of you, because of love, and so love was a kind of curse.
This made him think about how African Americans were people who used to be from Africa but were now from America but then also both, and how that was true of Native Americans except there wasn't such a thing as Native America anymore the same way there was an Africa still.
It makes more sense to Lony to worship something like the sun than a dead guy on a cross who rose from the grave like a zombie, and all that stuff about eating his body and drinking his blood, or bread and wine to pretend it was his body and blood? Christianity is so weird, but everyone pretends like it isn't.
That they keep anything that came from your mother will be a kind of miracle, as all Indians alive past the year 1900 are kinds of miracles.
In an ideal world, Sean would be referred to as they/them, by everyone without anyone having to ask or explain. In an ideal world, there would be better, more inclusive, kinder language for everyone. He does not live in such a world.
Sean Price had had this fuck-it kind of energy for as long as he could remember. He believed he was born with it, that people who were could just say fuck it and do something crazy, something most people would have the common sense never to do, because yes you only live once and all that, but the fuck-it energy was different. It wasn't even necessarily a bad thing. It could be useful. Sean believed it came from having been adopted, from someone else having said fuck it about him.
White boys thought the world of themselves, thought the world was themselves, and that anything otherwise was out of place, needed to be noticed or ignored. But Sean wasn't gonna pretend like at one point he didn't want to be one of them. He was always careful about how much sun he got. He reserve pinched the sides of his eyes to a stretch to try to make them stay bigger, or pulled his nose out to make it less wide, or sucked his lips in to hide the fullness.
"But nobody wants to be told they need therapy just like nobody wants to be told they got problems."
"They should make one called 23andMeToo, people could use it to find out how many known rapists are in their line," Sean said, thinking this would, as his dad suggested, lighten things up.
"You can't use DNA to know who was a rapist," Tom said.
"Well, first of all, you can and they very much use DNA to prosecute rapists, but also, speaking historically, of people in your line, if they were known rapists, say someone like Thomas Jefferson for example, he was a rapist.."
.....
"We used to be able to joke around a lot more. I'm sorry, but I miss that," Tom said.
"Yeah, sorry, life was way funnier before Mom died and I almost lost the use of my legs."
"We can't keep being all down about it. We've got to get up and stay up. She would want it that way, right?" Tom said. "Mom would want it that way, right?"
"We're not saying anything to each other," Sean said. "We're not hearing each other."
The spit said he was white from Northern and Southern Europe, Native American from North America, and Black from the North African region. He’d already assumed he was part Black, because he knew what he looked like. Because people know what they look like. And because of the way people had always looked at him in the white community he grew up in; there was no mistaking the look you got if you were assumed Black or part Black in a white community—whether you were or were not all or part, with or without the data regarding your DNA. But everything about race and background was trickier when you were adopted. Sean didn’t feel he had the right to belong to any of what it might mean to be Black from Oakland. And he couldn’t pretend to now be Native American, not white either, but he would continue to be considered Black, holding the knowledge of his Native American heritage out in front of him like an empty bowl. Being part white was something he’d just assumed. Even if he hadn’t been white, everyone was raised with whiteness as the standard and as the gaze, so you had it in you even if you didn’t, it was the background sound you only ever noticed got turned off in rare moments when the spotlight shifted temporarily.
But when Sean said I am Oakland at the end of his presentation, it felt more true than when he heard Oakland Lee say it. Sean felt good when he said it, about saying it, but Oakland Lee made everyone laugh, and Sean had basically shit on white liberals celebrating diversity without really addressing the white supremacist, systemic problems that made diversity so necessary feeling as to be celebrated by white people who want so bad to be on the right side of history they forget they're inevitably on the white side of history. So Sean ended up feeling really bad about the whole thing in the end.
Graphic: Pregnancy, Addiction, Animal death, Alcohol, and Blood
Moderate: Child death, Rape, Gun violence, Mass/school shootings, and Drug use
Minor: Death of parent and Medical trauma
mmccombs's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
4.0
The first third, the more historical fiction aspect to this novel, was a full 5 stars from me. I loved how the characters connected (and chronologically! Thank you!) and how distinct their voices felt while keeping a familial thread throughout. The themes here of historical trauma and resilience, of surviving and passing down stories, were so clear and well crafted. It is very impressive that this is both a prequel and a sequel at once, but I mostly think it should have just been the former. While I did enjoy coming back to these characters, adding a sequel to what felt like a wholly complete novel is perhaps too much of a good thing, a wonderful story to return to but also treading a lot of the same ground we have already covered. It didn’t feel fresh, I was unfairly comparing it to the 1st novel, and I found the wrap up at the end (“where are they now??”) to be a bit neat.
On the whole, there is so much to love here and I leave this knowing Tommy Orange is an instant-buy author, hoping more people will find and love his work. The first part worked much more for me, but I can’t say no to a compelling character-driven novel!
Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the eARC!
Graphic: Colonisation, Genocide, Abandonment, Medical trauma, Drug use, Addiction, Suicidal thoughts, Murder, Self harm, and Alcoholism
Moderate: Mass/school shootings
sshabein's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Graphic: Genocide, Violence, and Addiction
brewdy_reader's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
𝘦𝘈𝘙𝘊 • 𝘗𝘶𝘣 𝘋𝘢𝘵𝘦 27 𝘍𝘦𝘣 2024
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚙𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚠𝚎𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚊 𝚠𝚎𝚋 𝚝𝚘 𝚔𝚎𝚎𝚙 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚜 𝚒𝚗 𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚌𝚎, 𝚊 𝚐𝚞𝚒𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚍𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚜. 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚜 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚙𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚘𝚘. 𝚃𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚎𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝."
At the end of There There, the story felt incomplete, raw, unfinished, unresolved, without closure. You could argue that that was the point.
However, for those who wanted more, you will find that here. Both going backwards in time multi generations and forward in time from the Big Oakland Powwow, blending historical and contemporary fiction into one book, we trace the families and lives of characters from There There from past into present day.
Wandering Stars highlights the impacts of addiction, grief, loneliness, & belonging. The writing style flows between poetic prose to stream of consciousness as we jump POVs between minds of characters numbing their pain via toxic coping mechanisms as one bad event leads to one bad decision to another and another to where there seems no way out but deeper into the abyss.
If I had a complaint, it would be the sheer volume of characters, which to effectively track requires family tree diagramming with arrows and cross references. There were many memorable moments. I must have highlighted over half of the book.
This one will stay with me for a long time, so I am rounding my rating up from 4.5 to 5.
✨ Releases Feb 27 ✨
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, and Vintage & Anchor for allowing me to review this book. All opinions are my own.
TW: Addiction, Drug Use/Abuse, Self Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Alcoholism, Racism, Rape, Abuse, Genocide, Trauma.
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts, Alcoholism, Genocide, Violence, Torture, Addiction, Self harm, Drug use, Drug abuse, Racism, Pregnancy, War, Murder, Rape, Mental illness, and Kidnapping
Minor: Gun violence and Mass/school shootings
princessfabulous's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Wandering Stars is an epic family saga that takes our well-known characters Orvil Red Feather and Opal Bear Shield and pushes back several generations to see where their inherited trauma may have been born. We spend a bit of time with Orvil's great-great grandfather Jude Star, who escapes the Sand Creek Massacre only to wander America until he's captured and sent to Indian school in Florida. His son, Charles Star, is left alone at a young age and also goes to Indian school before escaping west to Oakland. Then we meet to the two generations before Orvil's before catching up with him in the aftermath of the pow-wow shooting.
The lion's share of the story is how Orvil is coping as he heals from his wound, which is to say, he isn't, really. I don't want to go into any further detail on the story, but here is where we can see all the damage outlined in the prior generations play out alongside Orvil's very real current traumas. Overall, I really loved this take on the family and how the treatment of Native Americans throughout history is very much affecting those living today. It's heartbreaking yet inspiring to watch individuals struggle and persist despite all they are up against day to day.
Thank you to Tommy Orange for this beautiful story, and to Alfred A Knopf and Net Galley for the ARC. I can't recommend enough that we continue to read and support stories of this caliber to continue to better understand each other.
Moderate: Drug use and Addiction