Kathleen's Reviews > Wandering Stars

I read There There almost five years ago now, and it probably would be best to read these two books closer together to get the full impact of the family connections. Wandering Stars envelopes There There, stretching both before and after, and following a family line from the Sand Creek Massacre (of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes by the US Army) in 1864 Colorado to present day Oakland, California.

It’s a story of major trauma--genocide and ongoing erasure--and how those experiences have impacts down family lines into the future, like depression and pain and addiction. But it’s very much a story of survival.

I found myself reading it less for plot than for immersion into Orange’s stream of conscious style. He embodies the point of view of various characters, and I found the writing mesmerizing and so thought-provoking.

“We have to sound out our stories, and they may come out slow and clumsy, and we may misspell them, so to speak, at first, when we first go to try, which is to say we may misunderstand them. But as we frame and reframe them, our own stories, the ones we tell each other and tell ourselves about what happened to us, and what it means in the context of our lives, and the bigger life we’re a part of, the better we can understand what it all means, the more sure and purposeful our steps forward will become, and the more informed our decisions will be.”

There is so much here. The reader takes a journey with these characters into addiction particularly, but all of the experiences were palpable: first love, parenthood, the pull of family, the meaning of home, even a small section on chemotherapy was intensely illuminating.

A difficult story, uniquely told and gorgeously written.

“… but the dead are never far. They find us in dreams, and keep teaching us from the inside long after they go …”