The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller
There There—winner of the PEN Hemingway Award the John Leonard Prize the American Book Award
and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year—Wandering Stars traces the legacies of
the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the
shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather’s shooting in There There. Colorado 1864. Star a
young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle where
he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt an evangelical
prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians an institution
dedicated to the eradication of Native history culture and identity. A generation later
Star’s son Charles is sent to the school where he is brutalized by the man who was once his
father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment Charles clings to moments he shares with a
young fellow student Opal Viola as the two envision a future away from the institutional
violence that follows their bloodline. Oakland 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely
holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil.
From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed Orvil begins compulsively googling school
shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant
to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother Lony suffering from PTSD is struggling to
make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting
blood rituals which he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift
experimenting with Ceremony and peyote searching for a way to heal her wounded family.
Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future Tommy Orange once again
delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous a book piercing in its poetry
sorrow and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already—classic first novel and a devastating
indictment of America’s war on its own people.
