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 20th 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.
