From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

Wandering Stars

Tommy Orange

Start date: December 15, 2024

Finish date: January 15, 2025

Discussion: Reading List

Discussion leader: Barb

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Reading List

* The Schedule for July through Dec. 2025
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What Members Thought

Jun 18, 2025 Laurel Bradshaw rated it really liked it

Shelves: color-rating-red, native-americans, next-to-read-in-series, dual-timeframe, 1860s, themes-stars, 2010s

4 red stars.

In some ways, I liked this better than There There. It stuck to one family rather than a whole cast of unrelated characters. So it had some continuity. You could almost say this is a coming of age story of the three brothers, and it had a more hopeful and redemptive feel to it, despite the overall topic of addiction. I was disappointed, however, that as a generational saga, I just didn't see the continuity. We learn so little about Jude Star and his son that it could have been left 4 red stars.

In some ways, I liked this better than There There. It stuck to one family rather than a whole cast of unrelated characters. So it had some continuity. You could almost say this is a coming of age story of the three brothers, and it had a more hopeful and redemptive feel to it, despite the overall topic of addiction. I was disappointed, however, that as a generational saga, I just didn't see the continuity. We learn so little about Jude Star and his son that it could have been left out of the book entirely. I wanted so much more. Where the first book really excelled was in the whole identity question - what did it mean to be native American? But here, it seemed as if the three boys were so removed from their heritage - but not the legacy of discrimination and addiction - that I'm not sure that mattered in the end. The focus was all about surviving, overcoming, and healing from trauma, whether the more nebulous generational thing, or the more immediate traumas of gun violence, addiction, cancer, dementia, and loss of parents. It will be interesting to see where Tommy Orange goes from here.

Description: 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 Indian Industrial School, 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 bloodlines. In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic. ...more

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