“I wasn’t trying to be funny. I could have done it if you hadn’t come. We’ve just been the feather. We used to be the whole bird. We used to believe and we were the whole bird.”
Next up on my Booker journey is Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars (Knopf 2024). Wandering Stars is a bookend to Orange’s 2018 There There, serving as both prequel and sequel. It’s not something you have to read prior to reading Wandering Stars, but I would recommend it. Having just read Orange’s debut this year, it was still pretty fresh for me – and that could have contributed to my disappointment with Wandering Stars.
I wrote the following about There There: Soaked and blood, tears, and alcohol, it drips with generational trauma, past and present assaults. It echoes with the screams of the dead, dying and lost. It gets under your skin, in your ear – the thrum of a drum in your heart as the sound of gunshots leaves your head ringing. You feel this novel. You taste this novel. You breathe this novel.
And while Wandering Stars reads as a continuation of There There, it doesn’t have the same sense of urgency, or the feeling of the drum beat leading into the shooting that There There had. Because of that, the second half, which brings us back to some of the characters involved in the shooting at the pow wow, kind of fizzles out. The generational “prequel” portion certainly captivated my interest as it gave voice to those that came before, and it covers a lot of history and trauma. Some of the things I love most about the novel are the little things – like the title itself, the imagery with the bear without a shoe (which recalled my favorite parts of There There )( the use of Opal as a name that was passed down and for the necklace Bird Woman wore, and the stories that came from it. The use of dogs throughout the novel, from the Cheyenne legend to the dog they give Lony, is so quietly and cleverly done. These little bits are sparks of brilliance.
There’s a lot of talent in this novel and a lot of heart, but it’s a novel of two parts and one part is decidedly better than the other. It’s a good novel, but it’s not as powerful as There There.
Booker 8 of 13.
A Girl Named Tommi 