Book Review: Wandering Stars

Wandering Stars
by Tommy Orange
Review by Renata

Readers seeking answers to the cliff hanger ending of Orange’s Pulitzer nominated debut  There, There will  have to wait until the second part of this prequel/sequel.  First, he travels back to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to introduce one of the ancestors of the first novel’s protagonists. 

The following stories of six generations of Cheyenne and Arapaho forbears – tribes of which Orange is an enrolled member – convey the psychic violence of colonisation and the transcendent strength and spirit required to survive America’s war on its first peoples.

The despair, trauma, courage and resistance of these ancestors is echoed in the second part of the novel when Orange resumes the story of brothers Luther, Lony and Orvil Red Feather in present-day Oakland.  Recurrent themes of addiction, shame and self-attack are balanced by the redemptive care of family, and the power of a culture, “beating like a drum waiting for its dancer”.

More impressionistic than There, There, this sophomore novel resists the pressure to repeat a winning formula – a pressure to which many breakout novelists succumb.  Orange is braver, and I’m intrigued to see where this will take his writing next.

You can also listen to Renata’s review from RDU below: