Wandering Stars / Tommy Orange / 2024

Wandering Stars / Tommy Orange / 2024

Wandering Stars in many ways feels like a strategic recoil and reaction against the commercial success of its prequel There, There. The conversations about indigenous resilience, hope, and identity definitely got a bit romantic, pitying and irksome in some corners, as readers leaned on it so heavily to attempt to understand urban Native experiences. 

Wandering Stars succeeds in a few ways: 1) its portrayal of the family's aftermath: the boy who once taught himself Native dance through YouTube videos now hates the trauma associated with his Native identity and turns to drugs.  The family's trauma after the mass shooting damaged not just their relationships to their Native roots but their ability to care for one another adequately. This aftermath is felt like a necessary counterpoint to the narrative catharsis of There, There. 2) There are poetic heights, especially in the wandering star metaphor, that truly soar just as high as the jawdropping debut. 

The novel fails for me in that it feels too sprawling without the same narrative coherence of There, There. At times, the voice felt didactic or hamfisted about woke topics, such as Native appropriation of Black culture via hip-hop and non-binary identity. This book has a much less glamorous view of survival and points to the devastating loss and sometimes embarrassingly pitiful attempts at revival as a critical part of their characters’ Native sense of self.  As someone whose indigenous heritage has been so present yet far removed, it's a bitter reflection, at once a hug and a jolt. I think Wandering Stars is a book white people will have a harder time celebrating and feeling good about, but is a crucial counterpoint. I struggled with the pessimism of Wandering Stars, which I think is more rightfully called realism, and continue to wrestle with my frustrations with it and whether I’m wrong.  3/5