Wandering Stars

Orange works in two directions at once: backward to Jude Star's survival of the Sand Creek Massacre and forward past the Oakland characters of There There into the addiction and identity struggles of a new generation. Critics generally credited the historical sections — tracing how the boarding-school era and generations of forced assimilation produced the fractured inheritance the Red Feather/Bear Shield family lives with now — as the book's strongest material, deepening a sense of history There There only gestured at. The contemporary chapters drew more mixed notice, with some reviewers finding characters' political reflections stated too directly rather than dramatized. Even skeptics tended to agree the throughline — trauma passed down and only partially repaired through art or addiction — is handled without sentimentality.