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��History is like a horror story,�� wrote Roberto Bolaño and Tommy Orange chronicles the long history of ��America's war on its own people�� in Wandering Stars. Moving through the horrors of the past across generations of violence, genocide and institutional or social erasures and on into a present day of lingering traumas and addictions, Wandering Stars works something like a Godfather Pt 2 to his 2018 novel, There There, being simultaneously a sequel and prequel to the events of that book. We last encountered Orvil Red Feather as yet another victim to gun violence in the final pages of There, There, though this story on the legacy that brought his bloodline to that moment of bloodshed as well as the volatile recovery in the aftermath could just as easily be read as a stand-alone. Still, it was delightful to revisit familiar characters as well as many new ones, each with an impressively distinct voice in a narrative propelled by Orange’s extraordinary acrobatic use of language. Wandering Stars is a sharp critique on a bloodsoaked American history, tracing trauma from colonization and forced assimilation into addictions and fractured histories, though there is still a light and a heavy hope ��making this place more than its accumulated pain.��

��Surviving wasn't enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.��

Where There, There was caught in a breakneck inertia spiraling towards impending disaster, Wandering Stars does a lot of, well, wandering. We move across history through the many generations of the Red Feather family, taking us from the and into the forced assimilation programs or prisons. This is juxtaposed with a narrative set in the present following Orvil and several other familiar characters. It meanders but never flails, stepping in wide rings of time, sending its prose to swoop and soar, until finally you find a rhythm moving underneath it all and the narrative becomes a sort of dance. A celebration amidst the sadness, a tribute to the past and a plea for the future.

��Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.��

While this is a larger story made up of the amalgamation of multiple stories, this is also—in many ways—a story about stories and why they matter. Charles�� notes that his incomplete memories are nothing more than ��a broken mirror, through which he only ever sees himself in pieces,�� which nudges a central theme on how we use histories or stories as ways to understand our pasts and ourselves. A boy asks ��why there weren’t any Native American superheroes,�� or a woman in midcentury America is told by a librarian there doesn’t seem to be any books written by indigenous authors. Instead they must see the world through the narratives of people who look like the ��very kind of men some of us had seen wipe our people out.�� It’s why publishers need to ensure , its why we should make space for more voices lest we choke off storytelling as another form of silencing. That the character Jude witness so many atrocities but is mute and unable to vocalize them is a powerful metaphor, especially juxtaposed with the personal memoirs Charles is able to leave behind. Language and writing become a haven, and it is in learning to read and copy the Bible that we find the titular wandering star of the novel:

��Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.��

That Orange is a superb storyteller makes it all the better. Orange has a dynamic range of voice, moving between characters as well as from fiction to nonfiction passages. Orange has often in authors like Roberto Bolaño, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, or Javier Marías because they are �� not afraid to be really cerebral but also somehow have excellent pacing at same time,�� though many of the passages in Stars feels closer to the mechanics of one of his other favorites: José Saramago. Such as this passage which meticulously weaves languages while winding its way through the halls of history:

��When the Indian Wars began to go cold, the theft of land and tribal sovereignty bureaucratic, they came for Indian children, forcing them into boarding schools, where if they did not die of what they called consumption even while they regularly were starved; if they were not buried in duty, training for agricultural or industrial labor, or indentured servitude; were they not buried in children’s cemeteries, or in unmarked graves, not lost somewhere between the school and home having run away, unburied, unfound, lost to time, or lost between exile and refuge, between school, tribal homelands, reservation, and city; if they made it through routine beatings and rape, if they survived, made lives and families and homes, it was because of this and only this: Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry.��

He is speaking of the in boarding school programs that ran under the slogan ��Kill the Indian, Save the Man�� in an attempt to push ��the vanishing race off into final captivity before disappearing into history forever.�� This is why survival becomes so key in the novel, though merely surviving is often not enough. Often survival is its own trade off with destruction, such as how the granting of citizenship and assimilation was an effort to dissolve��'a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians'—the tribes and erase tribal identity. The forced full citizenship as a way to end federal recognition of tribes and transfer reservation legal jurisdiction over to the federal government, all despite indigenous peoples already being granted citizenship in 1924. As is often the case, language becomes a mask for cruelty.

��I think I needed to feel the bottom to know how to rise. Maybe we're all looking for our bottoms and tops in search of balance, where the loop feels just right, and like it's not just rote, not just repetition, but a beautiful echo, one so entrenching we lose ourselves in it.��

The novel is wracked with scenes of addiction, poverty and heartbreak but also the dilemma of a disconnect with the past. A large theme of There, There touched on how indigenous identity was often difficult to pin down in the modern world, a theme that continues here. While there is the recognition that ��no Indians from when they first named us Indians would recognize us as Indians now,�� even Orvil admits that in the present day many of the historical indigenous practices they keep alive ��can feel corny, and fake, or like trying too hard for something that wasn’t really there.�� Times change, identity shifts, and how can one feel the pulse of the past when the nation spent so much effort and violence into erasing their stories. Though this is not necessarily a complete loss as the novel notes that change is natural and life flows into life, such as the family lineage going from Stars to Bear Shields and eventually Red Feathers. The family marches forward through time even when beleaguered by external aggressions or internal struggles.

Ultimately, Wandering Stars captures ��the kind of love that survives surviving.�� It is the thing that keeps us going, the heavy hope we are willing to carry. This is an ambitious novel, a bit quieter and looser than its predecessor, and it seeks to capture the truly expansive ideas and questions on identity and history. While perhaps it overreaches at times and can occasionally feel like checking as many boxes of themes as possible instead of thoroughly exploring a tighter few, Orange manages to carry his ideas into fruition and craft an engaging novel that achieves its goals.

4.5/5

'Everything about your life will feel impossible. And you being or becoming an Indian will feel the same. Nevertheless you will be an Indian and an American and a woman and a human wanting to belong to what being human means.'