Let's Talk About Books: Wandering Stars

Join Let's Talk About Books, a monthly book club that meets on Zoom. The meeting is free and open to everyone interested, whether they have read the book or not.

November's title is Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange.  Copies will be available at the main desk for checkout one month ahead of the meeting. 

The title is also available on The Palace Project as an eBook or audiobook. The Palace Project is a free library app available in both Google Play and the App Store. Also available on the Libby app, as an eBook or audiobook. 

Synopsis:

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle,where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to bethe children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.