Wandering Stars: A novel

This was an eye opening family tree of Before, and a really harsh look at the After.I was hoping for better things to happen to these characters, but with addiction thrown in it was inevitable to end up this way.It was a wild ride, and well worth it.

3/5 stars rounded up.Like so many others, I LOVED Orange's debut There, There about "urban Indians" and their individual struggles to reach the Oklahoma pow-wow. So I was very excited to see that he had another book coming out and that it is a sort of sequel to There, There which ended rather abruptly, in my opinion.I have mixed feelings about this offering. As always, reading Orange is a master class in writing at the sentence level. His command and control of language is beautiful and sometimes surprising. I really love his style. He's readable but also cerebral and literary.This book is rightfully split into two parts. The first part is a sweeping and quick overview of hundreds of years of Native American history told by the ancestors of Orvil - one of the victims of the shooting at the pow-wow in There, There. It spans generations in this family. I learned a lot in this section, but it dragged for me. LOTS of telling. And the parts that he did include were cursory history of the events. I'd love to see an entire book on the Prison Castle/re-education schools in Florida where we really get inside the lives of the characters there. This entire section felt like a bulleted list of moments in Native American history instead of really getting into the nitty-gritty of these events. I'm curious about the though process behind backing up this far, just to zoom ahead and really zero in on the aftermath of the pow-wow shooting.The second half follows several of the characters we met in There, There. This section felt disjointed to me. There were several POVs that were told in first person. Several in third person, A few even in 2nd person. And I couldn't quite understand why or even what the point was. I don't think it necessary added anything to the story to switch around like this. This section did move a bit faster with the inclusion of more dialogue, but it still felt like it was trying to do too much in a little amount of time.Overall, this really felt like two separate books that perhaps Orange couldn't decide which direction to take his second book - or maybe didn't have enough stamina or material/ideas to make two separate books, so he smooshed them together into this one. I did like it. I did highlight a LOT of really great, inspirational, important quotes. But it just didn't hit the same way There, There did. It almost felt like Orange had some salient points he wanted to make about the Native American experience and just used the under-developed characters as a vehicle to deliver these nuggets of wisdom. I didn't feel overly invested in any of the characters. And I don't know that any of them really grew or changed that much as the story progressed.Wandering Stars is definitely worth the read. Do I think it is going to have the lasting affects of There, There - not for this reader. But I'm glad I read it and it did make me do some more research into the historical events mentioned in the beginning.Thank you to NetGalley, Tommy Orange, and the publisher for allowing me to read and review an Advanced Reader Copy of this novel.

Love every word sentence and image.

I read There There so was curious as to what Orange would do next.This multigenerational saga: "...traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Red Feather’s shooting in There There..." Enter "Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who ... found[s] 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. Fast forward to Oakland, 2018 and Opal Viola VIctoria Bear Sheild, her nephew Orvil, his younger brother Lony, Loother, Jacquie, and a cast of other characters [the center of the book--to me].Bits about Theodore Roosevelt and his racism against Native Americans. Richard Henry Pratt--a real person.The book was concentrated in 2018. MUCH about drug addiction and trying to escape their reality. A family in tatters. Searching for--everything!Some of the language I did enjoy:"Pratt was stern and plain, with a nose that announced itself on his face like some stone monument on an otherwise unremarkable hill."Chemotherapy: "The stuff felt more like deletion than depletion, like a part of me was being permanently erased or replaced with gray gray grary gray, grayness."Learned:hobo is "short for homeward bound, or homeless boy."And of Pick's disease--a less common form of a type of dementia [frontotemporaral dementia].An interesting, difficult read, made more so for me because of many long, run-on sentences which are a disconnect for me and which I often had to reread to follow the trajectory. I got lost in the riffs.Too much on addiction to my liking, but...