This deeply expansive portrait of a Native American family and those inextricably linked to it is Tommy Orange's masterful follow-up to his 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 fills Wandering Stars with his signature musical prose and searing precision of language to tell a story about survival, belonging, and simply being human. He begins Wandering Stars with a nonfiction prologue about the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans, about children forced into boarding schools to be taught that their way of life was wrong, then goes on to capture with magnificent potency his characters' experiences as Native Americans. Wandering Stars is 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