Tommy Orange

Fiction 2025 | 336 pages

Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange's follow-up novel to There, There, which I loved.  What a vast disappointment Wandering Stars is.   This novel follows two sequential timelines: what happens after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the aftermath of a shooting at a powwow in 2018.

There is no plot.  The only theme I find is drug addiction, and repeated failure with sobriety, rejuvenation, and recovery. This goes on for seven generations of this Native family (except we miss some generations, given the 100+ year gap in the story line).  The drugs they use include laudanum, morphine, opiates, dust, opium, alcohol, morphine, hydromorphone, ketamine, MDMA (ecstasy), fentanyl, and a drug created by one character’s father, Blanx. I found the writing to be very jumpy. He intersperses present tense and past tense and has numerous confusing sentences.  He uses first person, third person, and even has a very odd section of second person writing.

At page 201, I decided to skim, so I could give it two hearts instead of one.  In part this was because the girls and young women of the first story line were quite interesting, but the boys and young men of the present-day timeline were boring.  And in part it was because I was just very tired of reading about addiction, though I did learn a bit about Native culture, norms, values, challenges, communication, loyalty, and familial relationships.

I have no right to this opinion, but my blog is not public and only read by my friends and acquaintances, so I will venture to express my viewpoint. It seems to me Tommy Orange has sadly done a big disservice to Native populations, portraying them as drug-addicted, generation after generation, in Wandering Stars.

I do not recommend this book.

March 2025