Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
WANDERING STARS is the eagerly-awaited follow up to Tommy Orange’s THERE THERE. The book opens with the story of Star in Colorado in 1864, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, who is brought to the Fort Marion prison where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who later founds 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. While there, Charles forms a friendship with Opal Viola, and the two envision a future far from Carlisle.
Future generations experience displacement and impoverishment at the hands of the government, as Orange ramps the narrative up to the stories of the adult Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, her half-sister Jacquie Red Feather, and Jacquie’s culturally adrift grandchildren Orvil, Lony, and Loother, from There There. When Orvil, who has been injured in a rollerblade hockey game, meets Seth, who still bears the bullet he took at the Powow, the two become addicted to painkillers. Eventually Orvil finds sobriety and severs his relationship with Seth.
WANDERING STARS is an unflinching look at epigenetics and generational trauma told through the one-hundred-and-sixty-year history of a family – who survive unwavering cruelty, indifference, and injustice, but ultimately rise above it all … like shining stars.
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