This deeply expansive portrait of a Native American family and those inextricably linked to it is Tommy Orange's masterful follow-up to the PEN/Hemingway and American Book Award-winner, There There. Part prequel, part sequel, Wandering Stars traces a family line from a boy who escapes the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to his descendants in the aftermath of the powwow shooting that takes place in There There. It is an immersive and stunning saga about individuals endeavoring to survive and to live.

Orange, as he did with There There, begins Wandering Stars with a nonfiction prologue, this one about the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans, about children forced into boarding schools to be taught that their way of life was wrong, about their descendants being told they "weren't the right kind of Indians to be considered real ones." In so doing, Orange sets the stage for Jude Star's story to spill across time to Orvil Red Feather, who must continue living after being shot at the Oakland powwow.

The image of wandering stars connects these two distant relatives, both of whom become lost in addiction. The bullet shard shaped like a star inside Orvil might "wander," so it must be watched carefully. What it does instead is carve a hole inside Orvil that he fills with pills. Orange portrays that addiction deftly. Drugs grant Orvil a certain kind of freedom. While high, he plays music, for the first time fully immersed in what is happening. In school, he finds a self-certainty he previously lacked, an "easy-spread peanut butter, white-boy confidence." It's a feeling he doesn't want to lose.

His great-great-great-grandfather, Jude, turns to alcohol. He feels like the "wandering stars" in a Bible verse who are "twice dead" because he survived Sand Creek, was then jailed at a prison-castle, and upon liberation, had to change his name, which to him is "like dying again." Consequently becoming a heavy drinker ("alcohol I wished I just wanted but knew that I needed"), Jude wonders whether to believe in a second wind in life--a "part of you, hidden away in a true place, even from yourself, for when you needed it most." That belief carries him past drinking, past a job as chief of police "stopping any and all Indian ceremonies and rituals," and into fatherhood with a son, Charles, to whom he tells stories of his life. "Stories do more than comfort," Jude narrates, "They take you away and bring you back better made."

Perhaps Jude's second wind is also what fuels his descendants, because his great-granddaughter Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield embodies strength. She wants to go on living with her three grandnephews--Orvil, Lony, and Loother--and her newly sober sister "like [they've] been given a second chance and not like something's already been taken away from [them]" by the powwow. It is too positive an outlook for her, and Lony notices. He, who feels furthest of them all from being a "real" Native American, dreams of dominoes that he knows represent his family line--"all that they couldn't carry, couldn't resolve, couldn't figure out"--"coming to knock him down." He can make this better, he thinks, with his blood, which he is burying to see if it's magic because that same blood helped Orvil heal. "You have to trick yourself into believing," he tells his family. Loother, who sees how hard Lony, and everyone else, is trying, wants them all to chill out like he's trying to do. Go to school, spend time with his girlfriend, think about ridiculous things like robot takeovers--that's living. He knows this world is backward, but he likes living. The question is whether his family can all see their way to living, too.

Orange fills Wandering Stars with his signature musical prose and searing precision of language to tell a story about survival, belonging, and simply being human. It is also a story about story itself, about purpose. Jude Star's son Charles feels "muddied" from his parents "mixing their blood and making him. Surely there was a story he was a part of, that spoke to the purpose of his life?" Even moments from death, he wants to find it. Decades later, Charles's second great-grandson, Orvil, listens to his therapist explain that "we have to sound out our stories... frame and reframe them" to make our steps forward more purposeful.

This, Orvil finds corny, which Orange connects to authenticity, another theme woven throughout. An imprisoned Jude Star "perform[s] being Indian for the white people," dancing while they watch "with that strange mix of disgust and astonishment." Victoria Bear Shield wonders where she would be from if she were a "real Indian." Sean Price, whom Orvil befriends, bemoans his good looks, which get him treated superficially, denying him the "real experience regular-looking people got walking around in the world all regular." Being a real Indian isn't something Lony cares about, yet a powerlessness and heaviness move him to try in astonishing ways.

Orange captures with magnificent power his characters' experiences as Native Americans. Victoria wonders if her name came from a victory cry that her mother sounded after bringing "another Indian into a country that'd been doing its best to disappear [Indians] for hundreds of years." Her great-grandsons will come to think of themselves as time travelers: "Everyone only thinks we're from the past, but then we're here, but they don't know we're still here, so then it's like we're in the future." It is through these striking moments of clarity, and through his characters' drives to find fulfillment in life, that Orange has created in Wandering Stars a transcendent, multi-POV novel that beautifully humanizes a way of life that the powerful in the U.S. have been attempting to eradicate for generations. --Samantha Zaboski

Tommy Orange (photo: Michael Lionstar)

Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, Calif., where he currently resides. His first novel, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award as well as the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award. Wandering Stars (Knopf, February 27, 2024) expands that story, exploring the legacies of the characters affected by the powwow shooting in that book.

There is a beauty in how you linked the Opal Viola Bear Shield chapter, written in first-person but addressed to Victoria, with the Victoria Bear Shield chapter written in second-person. How did this come about?

That came about totally organically. The decision to have Opal speak internally to her unborn daughter happened somewhere along the way, and by the time I switched Victoria's chapter to be in second-person, I wasn't thinking about the relationship between the two until after it had been written. It was a pleasant surprise, for them to have this kind of second-person POV relationship, but it wasn't what felt like a conscious choice, and was perhaps an unconscious one, which happens for me when writing a novel. All kinds of things come I never planned.

Victoria then became the fulcrum in the story, where it teeters from prequel to sequel.

That had mainly to do with chronology rather than causality. For a long time, the novel was written in a non-linear way. It was only late in some of the later drafts that I became convinced, with the help of my editor and after reading Oscar Hokeah's Call for a Blanket Dance, to write in a linear way.

The various depictions of addiction in the novel aren't cut-and-dried: we see Orvil not euphoric but simply able to be happy, and Lony attempting to connect to what he seems to feel is an ancestral way of healing and living. What was your thought process behind the way their addictions manifested?

I'm trying to depict addiction as it is. It is so often stigmatized. And black-and-white. I was trying to bring compassion and nuance to a subject often thought of in terms of right and wrong. Addiction is much more prevalent in our lives than we'd like to admit. I wanted to try to have my characters relate to it in a way that felt real and so the reader understands it's not just, this is bad, don't do this, but rather, this is how it happens, this is what it can look like. Anyone who has struggled with addiction themselves, or has struggled with a family member or friend with addiction, knows it's never simple or easy.

Loother wants to know, "Why's it gotta be so hard for people in this family to just be normal.... Like just quit doing too much. Like just get a job or go to school, and find shows and movies you like, and meals you like to eat, and make friends and fall in love or whatever." Were you using Loother as a sort of grounding force for Lony and Orvil? And how did he have the strength for this?

I do think Loother is a grounding force in the book. How he has the strength is probably related to how Opal has the strength. Always somehow had the strength. Opal would certainly have influenced at least one of the boys in a way that made it possible to escape these cycles of addiction.

Memory plays a huge role here--the act of forgetting on purpose, the splintered nature of a remembered past, the way a photograph is a "crime against memory." Is your relationship with memory similar to those of your characters?

To me, memory is history, so therefore is story. It is the way we remember. We recollect pieces of what happened and put it in a way that makes sense narratively. In a way, I grew up without story. My dad tried in a way to protect us from aspects of his history. Raising us in the city rather than in Oklahoma was a part of this attempt at protection. Being generally reticent was another way he tried to protect us. Maybe. I don't know how conscious that decision was, but I know it is common for people who experience trauma to not talk to their kids about their lives at all. Opal has a tricky relationship with remembering. She was so affected by her past. But this ends up doing harm anyway. Her grandchildren not knowing who they are is a part of why they suffer. Jacquie may be closer to looking at the past. Feeling it. And suffering from it.

There's also a very clear use of music here in different ways--how music loops like life, how music is a language, how music can help you stop thinking, or even simply how playing music gives you the opportunity to create an alter-ego. How does music tie to that theme of memory?

Music in some ways is more tied to the present than anything; nostalgic music aside, music is sort of anti-memory. It is so important it's hard to talk about. Like dreams. Which we sort of refuse to talk about. Music is so deeply rooted in feeling, the present feeling of hearing and feeling the music while it's happening, and it is so universally loved, it's quite hard to underscore or relate the importance of music in so many people's lives. I was just trying to get at that.

You've rejected, through your work and interviews, this persistent yet harmful idea that wearing feathers or maintaining an identity intrinsically tied to reservations is the only possible way to present as Native people. How do the Native people living in urban areas in Wandering Stars speak to that?

Overall, I'm trying to restore our humanity. We have been dehumanized in the American and global imagination so extensively and for so long, I'm just trying to write real feeling characters who are Native people. I feel sort of allergic to the idea that there are authentic ways of remaining Native, especially as it relates to non-Native people authenticating for us what that means. There are countless Native people who work in offices, who are experts at Excel or coding, who are real estate agents. There are Natives who speak their language but also love to play Minecraft. Remaining Native to me feels like tricky territory because it often has to look like something old in order to feel true, like playing the flute or dancing powwow, when remaining Native has more to do with basic survival much of the time. There is a tradition of adaptation that has existed amongst Native people for thousands of years, but we are often held to this impossible standard of authenticity and not allowed modernity in the American imagination, mostly because of the way we have been and continue to be portrayed and taught. --Samantha Zaboski