“Wandering stars, to whom it is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.”
Here’s more about Wandering Stars
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.
Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.
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My thoughts
I originally gave this one three stars, but after a week of thinking about it, I feel like I did this book wrong. Granted, it’s not perfect. The writing style is very disjointed, it doesn’t give a lot of that interesting backstory it starts off with, and I found myself wanting more of a lot of pieces here and there. If you’re not a fan of these elements or find it frustrating to read, then you may not like this story. But this is a character-driven novel and something these stories are really good at doing is getting characters into your head. These are characters you think about, you worry about, and you wonder about well after the final page. And the circumstances that Orvil, Lony, Loother, and the rest of the folks in Star’s family line weigh heavy on my heart weeks after reading it.
If I could check in with characters, I would. Check in and see if they’re doing okay, if they’ve accomplished their goals, if they’ve stumbled. Reading Wandering Star isn’t a prequel or a sequel to There, There, but it’s a check in. If you were thinking about the characters and how they coped with the shooting at the powwow and then how their lives turned out then this is the book for you. And I know Tommy Orange didn’t write this book to assuage the mental and emotional state of his readers, but it does help with it. Tommy Orange was just obliging to let you know.
While the historical bit of the book (the prequel) was truncated, it was the most fascinating. Hearing the history of Orvil’s family starting from Star, his time as a prisoner of war in Florida, how he was forced to assimilate to the “American” culture, how it didn’t phase Star, but somehow fractured his family line to the point where the generations to come wouldn’t know anything about him. How Richard Pratt, the white guy who made this all happen, thought he did the Native Americans a service when he only aided in them losing their sense of identity that only expands to present day Redfeathers and his lack of knowledge of the Cheyenne people. It reminded me a lot of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and how fractured history is for the characters in that book as well.
And of course, there’s a level of artistry when it comes to Tommy Orange’s books. You’re not going to read a linear story. It jumps from character to character learning bits and pieces of the fractured people they have become and the methods of coping with those fractures. Lony and his obsession with the energy coming out of our abdomens (shout out to Donnie Darko, which was an obsession for me when I was a teenager) then Loother and his relationship with girls, to Orvil and how he’s coping with being shot while doing his dance at the powwow (spoilers, not good). Using various perspectives and POVs, you’re not just reading a story but experiencing an entire ecosystem of cause and effect of history touching reality and the present pushing towards the unknowable future. It’s almost beautiful.
Overall, an intriguing story that answers “the after.” What happens after you’re shot? What happens after you’ve been whitewashed? What happens after your teens? It’s such an incredible way to share this story and like I said, you’ll be rooting for this family the entire time.
Simone and Her Books 
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