Book review of Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest. Tommy Orange demonstrates the veracity of that line in Wandering Stars, his follow-up to There There, the 2018 debut novel for which he was a Pulitzer finalist. Few literary debuts are as chillingly of-the-moment as There There, which spanned an enormous solid of Native American characters and culminated in a tragedy at an Oakland powwow. Orange additional explores the lives of some of these characters on this assured continuation.

Orange pulls off a neat sleight of hand in Wandering Stars: He limits the scope by specializing in only some characters, but he additionally expands his narrative by rewinding to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to inform the story of ancestors of the Red Feather household.

The guide begins with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, when the U.S. Army attacked Cheyenne and Arapaho individuals in present-day Colorado. As Orange places it, “seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons,” and killed lots of of Native Americans—a prolongation of “America’s longest war.”

One of the survivors was Jude Star, a mute man despatched by practice as a prisoner of conflict to a fortress in St. Augustine, Florida. The man the military selected to run the jail was Richard Henry Pratt. Years later, Pratt based the Carlisle School, to which Native American mother and father had been pressured to ship their kids to be “taught that everything about being Indian was wrong.” Jude’s son, Charles Star, is enrolled there. By the early 1900s, Charles develops an dependancy to laudanum and tries to interview an getting older Pratt to find out about his father.

The novel then shifts to 2018, when Orvil Red Feather, a survivor of the tragedy in There There, is making an attempt to beat his accidents and emotional trauma. Like Charles, he turns to medicine, in his case with the assistance of his buddy Sean, whose father units up a basement lab and begins his personal pharmacopeia. He additionally tries to piece collectively the story of his Cheyenne household historical past, though Opal, the great-aunt with whom he and his youthful brothers reside, isn’t forthcoming about their heritage.

The type of the primary half of the guide is completely different from the second, extra trendy half. If the end result appears like two separate books, there’s nonetheless a lot to advocate Wandering Stars, from Orange’s delicate depiction of Orvil’s path to restoration to the chronicling of essential, ignored moments within the brutal historical past of America’s remedy of its Indigenous individuals. As Opal laments, Native Americans have been “consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions.” Wandering Stars is an impassioned censure of that marginalization.