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knkoch's review against another edition
- 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
I'm sure they work really well read consecutively, but even if I had attempted that, I’m not sure I would have been successful. This was a really hard story to stick with and absorb, and at times I dreaded it. It’s the sort of book I had to sit with for several uninterrupted hours, as it just felt too heavy to dip in and out of. I think I liked this better than There There, if possible, because it examines the aftermath of the pivotal events at the end of the first book. Wandering Stars is all about aftermath: how do people survive after trauma, massacres, and violence? How do Native people, especially, recover and rebuild after each new wave of institutional erasure and attempted destruction? And how do they draw strength not just from their own resilience but the passed-down stories of those who came before?
This is a detailed and heartfelt examination of one family line, and it was satisfying to see their stories meaningfully summed up by the end. The characters Orange returns to felt well-realized, and he has a strong, distinctive prose style.
Graphic: Addiction, Drug abuse, Drug use, Gun violence, Suicidal thoughts, Mass/school shootings, Medical trauma, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Cancer
The second half of the book deals extensively with opioid addiction.colormecaro'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
5.0
1 - historical “before” part of Wandering Stars
2 - There There in its entirety
3 - Aftermath & Futures parts of Wandering Stars
I would thoroughly recommmend this way of reading the two books. If I hadn’t been able to follow on immediately after finishing There There, I think I would have rated it worse because it leaves quite a few questions at the end.
Equally, while the historical part seems very short (and I would love to read it in more detail), it provides some very necessary context for the general feeling of displacement and lack of connection to native roots that ripples through both books.
And while I still have some quarrels with the way Tommy Orange writes (a few more full stops instead of commas would have been nice), I loved how in Wandering Stars he focuses on fewer characters and gives them more depth. Something I was missing in There There.
I also hope Tommy Orange will write a book focussing on Lony in the future. That character just made sense to me (I am a white European woman, so this is absolutely a tribute to Tommy Orange and his writing ability).
I know I critiqued the writing so it should only be 4.5 but I want this in my 5⭐️ reads because feelings wise, it definitely was.
Graphic: Addiction, Cancer, Drug abuse, Drug use, Genocide, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Medical trauma, Toxic friendship, and Colonisation
katrinky's review against another edition
5.0
Graphic: Addiction, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Genocide, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Forced institutionalization, Medical trauma, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Alcoholism, Body horror, Cancer, Chronic illness, Gore, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Terminal illness, Violence, Medical content, Car accident, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Toxic friendship, Abandonment, Alcohol, Injury/Injury detail, and Pandemic/Epidemic
yourbookishbff's review against another edition
- 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? It's complicated
4.0
This read was ultimately not for me. It didn't stand alone easily, and I felt I was missing too much of There, There to really understand these big character jumps (requesting this ARC when I hadn't read There, There is ENTIRELY on me - I truly thought this would stand alone). I also don't love overwrought prose - sentences that are routinely paragraph-length run-ons remind me why I don't read as much lit fiction anymore. These are my own preferences, though, and I would still say this is an important and propulsive read that will likely be appreciated by those who loved There, There.
Graphic: Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Suicidal thoughts, Medical content, Grief, Medical trauma, Death of parent, Murder, Toxic friendship, Abandonment, and Colonisation
Moderate: Cancer, Sexual assault, and War
january_one's review against another edition
- 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? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Cancer, Drug abuse, Drug use, Gun violence, Self harm, Blood, Medical content, Grief, Mass/school shootings, Medical trauma, Death of parent, Colonisation, and Pandemic/Epidemic
ecn's review against another edition
4.5
Graphic: Alcoholism, Cancer, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Genocide, Gun violence, Hate crime, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Self harm, Sexual violence, Slavery, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Torture, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Police brutality, Medical content, Dementia, Grief, Mass/school shootings, Medical trauma, Car accident, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Toxic friendship, Abandonment, Alcohol, Colonisation, War, and Injury/Injury detail
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: Addiction, Animal death, Blood, Pregnancy, and Alcohol
Moderate: Child death, Drug use, Gun violence, Rape, and Mass/school shootings
Minor: Medical trauma and Death of parent
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: Addiction, Alcoholism, Drug use, Genocide, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Medical trauma, Murder, Abandonment, and Colonisation
Moderate: Mass/school shootings