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A review by dahlface
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
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
4.5
“A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you.”
From the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to the present day gun violence and opioid epidemic, Tommy Orange traces the Redfeather family tree and reveals how each generation’s trauma feeds the next.
Passages in this beautifully written recounting of Native American trauma - filled with the wrongs of white men and women - made me stop in awe, so heartbreaking in their truth. So plain in their understanding of survival, loss, longing, and hopelessness. Passages like:
“I'd taken an idea about second wind for myself. That if you could last through what seemed hardest, you got more, and that there lived somewhere in the body the ability to keep going even though it felt like you no longer could, some reserve of strength and power, to endure, that took its share but not all of you; that you could save some part of you, hidden away in a true place, even from yourself, for when you needed it most—to believe in that felt powerful enough to make it true.”
“You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. In lives behind you. It's there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I'm not there.”
“Selfish is the most likely thing to become if you've been abandoned, I think. Being abandoned means you don't think anyone else is really there for you when it comes down to it. So it's just you. Yourself. Being how you would be if there was no one else there.”
Told from the perspective of several generations, Wandering Stars stacks personal histories like stones in a cairn, leaving you with a monument to each experience so that you will never forget.
From the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to the present day gun violence and opioid epidemic, Tommy Orange traces the Redfeather family tree and reveals how each generation’s trauma feeds the next.
Passages in this beautifully written recounting of Native American trauma - filled with the wrongs of white men and women - made me stop in awe, so heartbreaking in their truth. So plain in their understanding of survival, loss, longing, and hopelessness. Passages like:
“I'd taken an idea about second wind for myself. That if you could last through what seemed hardest, you got more, and that there lived somewhere in the body the ability to keep going even though it felt like you no longer could, some reserve of strength and power, to endure, that took its share but not all of you; that you could save some part of you, hidden away in a true place, even from yourself, for when you needed it most—to believe in that felt powerful enough to make it true.”
“You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. In lives behind you. It's there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I'm not there.”
“Selfish is the most likely thing to become if you've been abandoned, I think. Being abandoned means you don't think anyone else is really there for you when it comes down to it. So it's just you. Yourself. Being how you would be if there was no one else there.”
Told from the perspective of several generations, Wandering Stars stacks personal histories like stones in a cairn, leaving you with a monument to each experience so that you will never forget.