Tommy Orange

The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller There There—winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize, the American Book Award, and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year—Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather’s shooting in There There. 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 Industrial School for Indians, 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 bloodline. 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 which 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.

A novel

Wandering Stars

Sabrina D. 

More performances happened after that. We performed ourselves, made it look authentic for the sake of authenticity. Like being was for sale, and we’d sold ours. I even danced in one. Pretended to know something I didn’t. It didn’t matter what I did, white people wouldn’t know the difference. Eventually I didn’t either, it seemed none of us did 

I read the book too, and liked how the monster learned langauge from the boy Felix, and remembered with great clarity a moment in the book when the monster explained that he can hardly describe the effect reading certain books was having on him. I felt that way too about reading, how quiet a behavior it was , and how it quiet I had become, how that seemed to match, and how it brought me closer to reading, to words on the page, how loud they could be in my head, almost as if I were hearing the words as I read them, and, sometimes, almost as if I were speaking the words myself. 

I didn’t care about what Pratt thought we were capable of as much as 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. 

This is a memory he keeps but doesn’t see, the one that lives in him, in a room he has all but abandoned. 

Your father had a harder time at the school, because he was a boy but also because of his freckles, which he had on account of him being a half-breed, which meant he got it bad from both sides. No one wanted him because he didn’t seem like he belonged enough on either side. 

Sometimes the look on his face got so bad it seemed to be saying he didn’t even belong to himself, did not even want to belong to himself. 

He ran circles around them as if he were out on the football field, and though he ran, no longer playing his trumpet, the notes still hung in the air, in our ears, calling for us to know what he knew, that we couldn't have known, what had been done to us since we arrived, and what had been done to him while he should have been sleeping. 

The song he played was not a song and not even a lament and not an alarm but like a call from a broken bird, whose throat and beak had become elongated through some trial of pain meant to break him, but only ended up transforming him into something longer stretched, and into his song with these notes that kept stretching after he stopped playing them, that sang about everything we’d been feeling all along stuck in our suits and dresses, in that school and without our language, he was making music find it for him, his long lost tongue and all of ours. 

Past family members and ancestors were constantly sending their blessings and curses down through time from that beyond before, that gave his present its particular bent, its dimness, its light, its scream, and its song, but also its sometimes dead silence. 

taylor miles hopkins

…the roar of the train was so loud he thought there was something coming out of his ears, so he held his hands against them and tried not to think of an iron horse carrying them inside it, him and Opal and the rest of the children off to an iron world, where everything was too hard to not end up hardening them, and too heavy to not end up crushing them.

Remember you are carrying someone over from the otherside.

Feel as if you are the only person in the whole world seeing it. Know that it was always true that you were the only one seeing the world the way you were seeing the world.

Wandering Stars quotes

Join the club