A dazzling work of literary fiction that springs from the center of otherness, his new book delves deep into what it means to be Native American in this country ... This is a novel that’s not scared to go into ugly, violent places. Orange perfectly balances the beauty of knowing where you came from, celebrating your ancestors, and recognizing the meaning of your roots and heritage with the brutality of racism and discrimination. That balance is reflected in the writing; poetic passages lead to shattering ones, cracking open the souls of his characters to reveal both their beauty and the lingering scars left by centuries of cruelty and forceful attempts at obliteration ... Tommy Orange has dug deep into the wound of history to deliver a narrative that shows what it’s like to be brown in a land that celebrates white, what it’s like to feel like you’re an outsider in your own home.
Second novels can be gawky creatures, sulky and strained as they try to slink out of the shadows of their predecessors. Will the second novel follow the formula, or repudiate it and chance something new? ... Wandering Stars, calmly and cannily, has it both ways ... But it is a different tempo, a different ambition—almost a different writer—we encounter in Wandering Stars. Where There There shoots forward with a linear trajectory, the new novel maunders and meanders. Repetition is its organizing principle ... With this expansive canvas to fill, Orange can seem perpetually out of time and out of breath. A few key characters are quick smudges, scarcely more than their signifiers ... The book appears to suffer from the same condition as its characters; it cannot see itself, cannot see that it need not hammer home every theme every time, that it speeds where it should saunter, tarries where we need to move. And yet it expands and expands—why not throw in a subplot about a suburban pill mill?—with such exuberance that even at its most sprawling and diffuse, I wondered: Is this novel flailing or dancing? ... What if this billowy book is intended to open a series of small doors, but for the reader?
Orange triumphantly returns with Wandering Stars ... It’d be a mistake to think that the power of Wandering Stars lies solely in its astute observations, cultural commentary or historical reclamations, though these aspects of the novel would make reading it very much worthwhile. But make no mistake, this book has action! Suspense! The characters are fully formed and they get going right out of the gate ... Orange’s ability to highlight the contradictory forces that coexist within friendships, familial relationships and the characters themselves, who contend with holding private and public identities, makes Wandering Stars a towering achievement.
An eloquent indictment of the devastating long-term effects of the massacre, dislocation and forced assimilation of Native Americans, it is also a heartfelt paean to the importance of family and of ancestors' stories in recovering a sense of belonging and identity ... A somewhat manic polyphonic construction that deploys first, second, and third person narration in its determination to capture the perspectives of its varied cast ... Orange has a predilection for repeating words that concern endurance and survival, which results in incantatory phrases that loop and curl in on themselves, as does his narrative. His language soars ... More than fulfills the promise of There There.
Orange provides an expansive understanding of these historical events and the consequences to people’s lives ... Orange has not allowed this effort at erasure, whether deliberate or passive, to succeed. His tool is his exquisite writing talent. Yes, it is a brutal story, and Orange is a remarkable storyteller. By writing of flawed characters and revealing human traits with which most anyone can identify, Orange chronicles difficult events in ways that others may hear and take to heart.
Wandering Stars is not technically a sequel, but it wraps around There There. Readers unfamiliar with the earlier book will feel its gravitational influence as some invisible body of dark matter, but fans will find here a rich expansion of Orange’s universe ... As Wandering Stars sweeps through the decades, Orange gathers up moments of love and despair in stories that demonstrate what a piercing writer he is ... It’s not too early to say that Orange is building a body of literature that reshapes the Native American story in the United States. Book by book, he’s correcting the dearth of Indian stories even while depicting the tragic cost of that silence.
A centuries-spanning epic of a Native family that manages to feel profoundly intimate ... The new book stands on its own; reading it feels like focusing your eyes on one eventful corner of a massive tableau.
Narrative heft accumulates less through individual stories than through the sum of these experiences ... Ultimately the turns their stories take – one becomes a self-harming runaway, another crashes a borrowed car while high – are about healing, not catastrophe; the same might be said of Wandering Stars, unlikely though it seems in the most harrowing moments of a novel marrying eye-opening historical re-creation with gritty social realism.
A densely populated, tightly plotted, and thoughtful response to Rob, to Gertrude Stein, and, more importantly, to the myths about and distortions of the history and the current situation of indigenous people in this country ... Deploying the capaciousness and elasticity of the novel form, Orange switches back and forth from the intimate to the panoramic, from the present to the past.
Tommy Orange confronts difficult subjects in mellifluous prose without veering into melodrama. He shows that storytelling is an intoxicant in itself, as powerful in its way as any substance.
Though Wandering takes a while to lift off, when it does, it undeniably soars ... If that sounds like a dark set of circumstances, it is. But Orange is nothing if not deeply understanding of and empathetic toward his characters’ plight. In fact, it’s his unbiased, compassionate treatment of Orvil and the addiction flattening his personality and threatening his future that cracks this multilayered, blisteringly honest novel—and our hearts—wide open.
...it does feel like early work. Emotions, either anger or anguish, spill from the pages, often at the cost of craft. There is a lengthy chapter told in the second-person 'you,' a writing workshop affectation that rarely succeeds and doesn’t here. Sections set in 2018, which mostly take the perspectives of damaged and outcast Oakland teenagers...become mired in the terminology of therapy and read like young-adult fiction. The historical grounding comes to seem like so much prologue, as though the main point of the past is to account for the traumas of the present. Mr. Orange’s strengths are his sincerity and conviction, but Wandering Stars is more persuasive as a diagnosis than a developed work of fiction.
Orange forgoes the explosive tragedy that punctuated his first novel and instead documents its lingering distension. It’s a potent and intimate pivot, one that builds in power as he mines the abiding grief of childhood’s passage, particularly within the contexts of Indigenous history and contemporaneity. This second work lacks the sense of sprawl that invigorated Orange’s debut, and there are stretches in the central section that can feel pulled too thin and blunted by repetition, leaving its three parts a bit wobbly in balance. But, as was the case with There There, he builds to a memorable crescendo.
Orange pulls off a neat sleight of hand ... The style of the first part of the book is different from the second, more modern half. If the result feels like two separate books, there’s still much to recommend ... An impassioned censure of that marginalization.
Though the parallel themes of substance use connecting characters from different eras aren’t exactly surprising, they add complexity and breadth to themes that could otherwise feel repetitive and claustrophobic. Orange smartly avoids words like trauma, preferring instead to present the lived experiences of Orvil and his family members as raw material for creating new meaning for themselves and their process of imagining new possibilities of what a family could be ... Ultimately, Wandering Stars is less about reconnecting with what has been lost than asking questions of how to define what lies ahead. Each voice is a dream that transcends mere visions of the past to transform the voices of the living. For the brothers and their lineage, there is freedom in sobriety, solace in togetherness, and a kind of victory in continuing the stories that make life into something worth living.
[A] tender yet eviscerating history of a family’s survival—day to day, generation to generation—and their uneasy yet persistent belief in that survival. Their story, one character realizes, 'has to be lived in order to be told, it is the song being sung, the dancer in midair,' and, indeed, there is so much life in this mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic novel.
