Wandering Stars

Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange's 2024 second novel, the historical-and-contemporary follow-up to There There (2018) and the structural completion of the project the first novel established. The novel begins with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado Territory, follows the survivors through the Fort Marion prison-camp at St. Augustine in the late 1870s, and runs the ancestral chain forward through approximately a hundred fifty years of the Bear Shield-Red Feather family to the contemporary Oakland survivors of the powwow violence that ended There There. Orphans, prison-camp children, federally-mandated boarding schools (Carlisle Industrial), urban-relocation Oakland of the 1960s-and-1970s, and the present-day Red Feather brothers (Orvil, Loother, Lony) whose recovery from the powwow shooting is the contemporary structural anchor.

Orange's structural method is the cross-cutting between the historical timelines and the present-day Oakland recovery thread, with the structural argument the two novels make together becoming explicit in the back half of Wandering Stars. The Sand Creek and Carlisle Industrial School chapters are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about specific institutional violence done to Indigenous American children in two distinct historical moments. The Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield chapters (the great-grandaunt who raised Orvil and his brothers, who appeared in There There) are the structural emotional engine that bridges the two novels. The Orvil-recovery thread across the back half carries the moral weight the entire diptych has been building toward.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural completion of the There There project, and as one of the canonical 2020s American novels. Read There There first if you have not. Compare to The Only Good Indians, James, Demon Copperhead on the broader contemporary American literary shelf. The Shaun Taylor-Corbett full-cast audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.