Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
American novelist Tommy Orange's latest is a masterful exploration of intergenerational trauma and displacement as told through the eyes of one Native family through the centuries
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange is a transcendent novel about one family’s intergenerational pain and grief. Set across two centuries, the novel follows the Star family from the horrors of a massacre in 1865 to a shooting in 21st-century Oakland.
Orange offers an intimate exploration of his cast of characters who descend from the Cheyenne people as they navigate trauma and displacement. The story never waters down the cultural erasure and systemic racism still faced by Native American people, instead confronting it head on with affecting honesty. Written with the adept skill of an archivist and heart of a poet, this novel is truly expansive thanks in large part to how Orange weaves the historical into the familial. There is an ever-present question haunting the Stars – how can you keep alive a history that was beaten out of your people?
The vestiges of this pain manifests into various addictions starting with alcohol and moving to the present-day opioid crisis. What will become the family’s salvation is storytelling and the passing on of ancestral knowledge. This desire to commune with the ancestors drives the youngest Star back to the land in hopes of finally healing his family: “I’ve known what this world’s about. I been running into it.” At times the viscera of addiction can feel uncomfortably raw, but even in moments of deep crisis, Orange holds space for humour and fierce love.