Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange’s second novel and a sequel of sorts to There There. I’ve been sitting on this book since last fall because I knew it was going to be a difficult read, and yes, it is difficult to read because it is sad and tragic, but Orange’s writing is so devastating beautiful that it helped propel me through the book.

Wandering Stars focuses on the family of Orvil Red Feather, the Indigenous teen who was shot at the end of There There while dancing at the Big Oakland Powwow. The novel begins with Orvil’s great-great-grandfather, Jude Star, who survives the Sand Creek massacre to end up in a prison in Florida with other Indians, and traces Jude’s lineage of tragedy. His is a family tree full of residential school survivors struggling to navigate an oppressive white world and disconnected from their own Indigenous community.

After Orvil survives the shooting at the Powwow, he loses his desire to dance and becomes addicted to painkillers. His spiral into addiction is intense and maddening, but also disjointed, to read as his once hopeful future disappears with one bad decision after another. The novel shifts perspectives between Orvil’s family members to show that they are all dealing with their own issues – his grandmother, Opal, is diagnosed with cancer and his younger brother, Lony, begins cutting himself and running away from home – that they do not even notice until it is too late how far gone he is, or how much their family has fractured.

Opal wonders if she hadn’t been so resistant to Orvil and his brothers learning about their Indigenous culture, they might have had a community to help them get through the aftermath of the shooting.  Instead, they have absorbed their family’s trauma and been taught that they must assimilate, even though they will never be able to assimilate, leaving them confused about how they fit into the world. But Wandering Stars ends with a hopeful message that generational trauma is only one aspect of Indigenous identity and that Indigenous communities need to work together to focus on the good to keep living for the next generations to come.

Wandering Stars is a more challenging novel to read than There There in terms of its narrative structure, especially after the novel moves away from Orvil’s ancestors and focuses on Orvil’s addiction, but if you have read There There and appreciate Orange’s writing, then I think you will appreciate this novel as well. You do not have to read There There in order to read Wandering Stars, but I still think you should read it first.