In the review of the magnificent book, There There, by Tommy Orange, (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2024/03/16/there-there/) you will find this:
Tommy Orange’s ‘There There’ Sequel Is a Towering Achievement
“Wandering Stars” considers the fallout of colonization and the forced assimilation of Native Americans.
By Jonathan Escoffery
After completing the exceptional book I concur with the sentiment expressed by Mr. Escoffery.
Having spent time in the book world I know that, like the music world, there are many “one hit wonders.” Sometimes, somehow, the magic that was the first novel is lost with the second book. This is not one of those times. Asking which I like best would be like asking a parent which twin they prefer. These books will stand the test of time. Tommy Orange had something to say, and he wrote it beautifully.
Readers can find a plethora of reviews in many places, including the interwovenwebofallthings. This writer has previously been called “unconventional”, something I wear like a badge of honor. To be honest, I realize my words matter little, if that, when it comes to attempting to review books like There There and now, Wandering Stars, two of the best novels these eyes have ever seen. Therefore I have chosen to allow some of the words written by the author speak for themselves. The words chosen resonated with this reviewer. There is nothing that can be added to writing this good. If you are reading these words, obtain the books
pg 45
Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.
pg 95
I need to tell you about your father so that you might come to know him. He is making his way over there, on his journey home, and the dead want to be remembered before they journey home.
And yes he will be gone once he goes, but the dead are never far. They find us in dreams,
and keep teaching us from the inside long after they go, so you might find each other, in some blue-white field, or overgrown underbrush, or beneath a forest home you’ll remember but have never known.
pg 103
I don’t know where the Havens got that crazy name from. Cholly. He’s one of these mutts you don’t know what kinds of breeds are in him and you don’t much care because he seems all his own in the eyes. Well he’s only got the one eye, but it’s got more life in it than I’ve seen in some men with two. And I’ve seen worse men than those with no life in their eyes. It’s worse when they know what they want and they’re hungry for it,
white men in this country, they come to take everything, even themselves, they have taken so much they have lost themselves in the taking, and what will be left of such a nation once they are done? My mother once said, “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors, or how strong their weapons.” I wondered about American women. White women. Where were their hearts?
pg 132
You will begin to go to the library, become a member and read as much as you can about Indians. About Cheyennes. There won’t be much but you will read it all. American history, too. Even some world history. You will read Mark Twain and dislike him. Jack London will hold your interest for a while, and the librarian will tell you that he became a reader at Oakland Public Libraries. But you will hate the way Jack London writes about Indian people once you get to those books. You will ask the librarian what novels are written by Indian people and she will tell you that she doesn’t think there are any.
pg 143
But stories are for telling after the fact. And the one true fact about the afterlife is that nothing comes from there. Everything goes there.
pg 139
You will tell her you are bringing a new child into the world and you will begin to dream up the life you will all live together once she comes, as if she were bringing a bright future with her from that otherside, from the beforelife.
pg 198
A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you.
pg 221
Lony dreamed about dominoes. He dreamed that he was a domino tile, and that there were lines of dominoes as far as he could see, falling in rows that seemed to get closer and closer to him. In the dream he didn’t know when the line would come that would knock him over and end his life. He knew that being knocked over meant that, and that the line was his family line, that something had begun long before he was born that was coming to know him down, but that this was true of everyone, each family line falling down on top of the living when they die, all that they couldn’t carry, couldn’t resolve, couldn’t figure out, with all their weight.
pg 237
One thing you can do when it seems there’s nothing else you can do, which is to say when you feel restless, is to walk, move your body through space and let the wisdom of what comes from that be your guide.
pg 251
“Look it up. But tell me this, do you think Bob Marley’s American grandchildren living in America are trying to act like they’re real Jamaicans? Even Bob was half white.”
“Bob Marley’s American grandchildren?” Sean took a second to reregister the pill bottle. He wondered what Orvil was taking, if he was some kind of high. Orvil closed his locker and started to walk away.
“Hey, wait up though,” Sean said, and followed Orvil. He noticed just then that he was taller than Orvil by a good foot. “I mean I know who Bob Marley is, but I don’t know if I know what you’re talking about.”
“Bob Marley’s son Rohan grew up in Miami. He played football. Almost went pro. His kid ended up playing for the Washington Redskins. You know the buffalo soldiers were named because of what Indians called them because they thought their hair looked like buffalo hair?” Orvil was gripping a metal railing, kind of rocking a little back and forth.
“Buffalo soldiers? Oh yeah I know that song.
So you spend a lotta time on the internet.”
“Some of the Havasupai people, they’re the ones who live down in the Grand Canyon next to some waterfalls, they believe Bob to be the second coming of Crazy Horse. D’you know hella Native people love reggae music, love Bob Marley?”
“I mean. Everyone loves Bob Marley, but that is still pretty crazy,” Sean said.
“Horse,” Orvil said.
“What?”
“Well if you believe the Havasupai people, he was Crazy Horse.”
pg 257
“Imagine. All these years. I don’t know why I been holding on to it, lord knows we don’t have the room for it, but we keep making room somehow, says every hoarder on those reality shows, ayyyy,” she said. Opal laughed a little at this, having watched some of those shows.
pg 268
Loother’s on his phone too. He’s playing chess, which he first started playing because he thought it’d make him seem smart and because Vee plays, so they play each other, but then he kept playing because he legit like it, like once he got past the beginning stages where he didn’t know what to move and he was just moving with no plan, it started to feel really full, like a really big game.
pg 308
It was one thing to be grateful for the ancestors, and another thing to know them on the page. I always felt like we didn’t do good enough. That our family line was in some way weak. And yes weakened by the effects of history, colonization, historical trauma. But also not strong enough to pass down the traditions or language successfully. Because we lacked something. I hadn’t considered everything that had happened. How far back it’d been happening to us. We come from prisoners of a long war that didn’t stop even when it stopped. Was still being fought when my mom helped take over Alcatraz. I was part of the fight too. So were my grandchildren. But 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.
And yes it would be nice if the rest of the country understood that not all of us have our culture or language intact directly because of what happened to our people, how we were systematically wiped out from the outside in and then the inside out, and consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions, but we needed to understand it for ourselves. The extent we made it through. The extent.
pg 312
School was a waste of fucking time. Literally. A factory farm for future office cows.
pg 326
“I don’t trust people who just believe, like without knowing anything or because they need to believe what they want to believe in more than they care about whether the thing they’re believing in is worthy of believing in, but I wouldn’t ever want to become a nonbeliever. Like how most adults end up. Kids know something you actively try to make us lose. You know that, right?”
“Make you lose what?”
“You know what I mean, Jacquie Red Feather.”
pg 352
I’m being asked to understand that with some people you love, they just won’t end up being a part of your life. I’m being asked a question that it seems I can answer only by living.
pg 366
And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand. – Clarice Lispector
pg 378
As for my higher power, I never found my way.
pg 381
No one noticed us, but that was the point. Sometimes a good sound is just supposed to be good enough to not be noticed. Rarely is anything so good a crowd gathers. Not at this kind of gig. There’s this old French composer I love named Erik Satie who wanted to compose what he called furniture music, by which he meant background music, music not meant to be noticed but to kind of just fill the room, which would now be called ambient music, but this was in the late 1800s, so pretty far ahead of his time, I’d say.
Armchair Warrior 