Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

 

Title:  Wandering Stars

Author:  Tommy Orange

Narrated by:  Shaun Taylor-Corbett, MacLeod Andrews, Alma Cuervo, Curtis Michael Holland, Calvin Joyal, Phil Ava, Emmanuel Chumaceiro, Christian Young, Charley Flyte

Publisher: Random House Audio

Length: Approximately 9 hours and 37 minutes

Source: Audiobook purchased from Amazon.com. 

Are you a book club member who reads every pick or do you skip reading some of the books?

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange was the Rogue Book Club pick for May, but the meeting was cancelled.  I usually read the book each month, but I hadn’t finished it yet, so I was okay with the meeting being rescheduled to July to give me time to finish it.  I discovered at the meeting that I was one of the only people that read the book as most others couldn’t get into it. It is not a light summer read. I loved it.

Wandering Stars tells the story of one Native American family and how the harsh treatment of ancestors in the past trickles down to impact the lives of modern day descendants.  The novel starts with the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado in 1864.  Star, a young boy survives and is sent to jail where he is forced to learn English and Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt.  Pratt goes on to found the Carlisle School where Star’s son Charles is sent and abused.  In the present, decedents struggle with a mass shooting, PTSD, and drug addiction.

My thoughts on the novel:

·       This novel was written in a stream of conscious narrative with beautiful language.  These first-person narratives felt like the personal story of each of the characters.

·       I have not read the first book, There, There.  I need to read it.  I was able to read this as a standalone novel, but I have a feeling I missed a lot of connections by not having read the first novel.

·       I enjoyed that the novel was a unique way of storytelling.

·       This book really hit home for me on how traumatic events of the past still affect lives of people living today. 

·       One character in the middle of the 20^th century goes to the library to find a book about Native Americans by a Native American. The librarian says there are none.  They must instead read their own history written by “the very kind of men some of us had seen wipe our people out.”

·       Author Tommy Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, which is the setting for a large part of this novel.

·       There was a full cast for the audiobook and it made it a great listening experience.  I think the format of the novel worked particularly well as an audiobook.

Favorite Quotes:

“These kinds of events were called battles, then later – sometimes- massacres, in America’s biggest war.  More years at war with Indians than as a nation. Three hundred and thirteen.”

“Bear Shield had told me the woman who wrote the book knew Indians. That she’d understood everything from way over there, where she was from.  And that being made to take a name like they’d wanted, being made to be the kind of person they wanted us to be, it was just like that woman’s monster, was just like she called Dr. Victor Frankenstein in the book, that was why he chose the name Victor, he was the man making the monster be agreeing to take their kind of name and living life the way white men like Pratt demanded.”

“Outside he sees the buffalo carcasses stripped of their hides, and beyond them the bones of buffalo piled up as far as he can see, and in the distance like an approaching storm cloud, countless vultures coming to swarm the waste.  It was the end of a world out there.”

Overall, Wandering Stars had beautiful writing, deep thoughts, and a compelling story.  I will be thinking about this book for a long time.