Reviews with content warning for Gun violence - Wandering Stars

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Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

32 reviews

brittanymccubbs's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

What a wonderful book. Tommy Orange has done it again. Tommy Orange really draws you into his writing and the stories he weaves into his books. This book follows a group of characters all from the same family, for the most part. We move through various generations and see what being Native means to them, and how it impacts their lives.

This book deals with the idea of belonging, addiction, recovery, generational trauma, and what home means when your peoples’ land was stolen from them. It’s about the way violence and trauma affects the lives of victims and the people around them. This book holds so much emotion, and so much gravity. It tells the tale of a family who are now the descendants of people that were the victims of a massacre. It dives into the trauma carried with that, and the conflict involved in finding out who you are in a place separated from your tribe and your people.

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lettuce_read's review against another edition

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4.0

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readingwithkaitlyn's review against another edition

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reflective sad slow-paced

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

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womanwill's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced

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

A multigenerational look at belonging, identity, and family through the lens of colonization, addiction, and generational trauma on the Indigenous communities in the U.S. Set mostly in modern-day Oakland, the land of the Ohlone tribe and a follow up to Orange's There There, his writing is as rich and all-encompassing as ever. I highlighted elite paragraphs of prose dripping with beauty and pain.

I most loved being back with the characters, particularly Opal Bearshield as she fiercely loves her family and 3 grandkids: Orvil, Lony, and Loother Redfeather. As well as their true grandma and Opal's sister, Jacque Redfeather as she worked through alcoholism. This book, also, at parts spans centuries in their family line of Cheyenne ancestors: a family that survives the Sand Creek Massacre, boarding schools, alcoholism and addiction.

This is not a light read but it is well worth its emotional depth and a must read for anyone who wants to read about the harsh survival of "Native Americans".

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-ARC.

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tamtasticbooks's review against another edition

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challenging dark 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

4.75

Wandering Stars starts with a man escaping the Sand Creek Massacre and follows his lineage down through addiction, trying to assimilate into a non-native society, and trauma. Each story is a little vignette into a piece of their lives and their choices. You can see them all strugggling to keep their culture a part of them, even as the world tries to tear it away. Halfway through the book, we move into the future, which continues the lineage and the trauma, but in a present, currently happening kind of way, rather than vignettes.

I loved this choice, showing the history and trauma built up and passed down over generations, and then how similar the current situations were. Addiction was a prominent theme, and death and everyone's constant proximity to it. Tommy Orange writes so well, it makes me heart hurt for these characters as if they were real people I know.

I probably would call this a follow-up rather than a sequel to There, There, and maybe that's because for some reason, even though I had long ago read the synopsis for this story, I forgot that it was going to end up dealing with characters from There, There. So when I got to the Part 2 of the book, I was BLOWN AWAY by the connection. That's on me and my poor memory, but I wouldn't have changed that experience.

Excellent story, interesting set-up, and beautifully written. Loved.

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the e-ARC!

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sssnoo's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

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

4.25

Tommy Orange's words often stop me in my tracks. He is a master of evocative sentences, paragraphs, and pages. And for that, I loved his new release, Wandering Stars. Orange's books are word artistry. Plots, though, are more elusive in his writing. There is structure, but it is ephemeral and involves many intersecting people and events. His characters are some of the most genuine people I've encountered in literature. Broken but healing.

If you love words, if you are looking for a book where the words will take you deep into another's universe, you should give this book a read. Tommy Orange is probably not your author if you want a linear story with a clear-cut plot.

The first part of this book details the multigenerational past of Orvil's family (Orval was a shooting victim from There There). The second half of the book deals with Orvil and his extended family. It goes deep into drug abuse and other mental health crises - it is dark reading at times.

This would be a good pick for a book club with many discussion topics.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for a review.

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ktdakotareads's review against another edition

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dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

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audreylee's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative sad slow-paced

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

3.0

Whereas “There There” was rapid bursts of characters which eventually connected, “Wandering Stars” is a slow, concentric, unending ebb and flow of relationships and secrets. Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for an arc.

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caseythereader's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

Thanks to AA Knopf for the free copy of this book.

- 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.

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bookishmillennial's review against another edition

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emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

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

disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial

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.

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