Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Orange's second novel is both prequel and sequel to the striking There, There (2018) and a centuries-spanning novel that stands firmly on its own. Once again featuring several narrator-characters, it opens during America's longest war—the 313 years of settlers' brutal attempts to annihilate the Native people who preceded them. The boy who will become Jude Star wakes to the sound of his camp's massacre, and escapes. In 1875, he's taken from Oklahoma to a prison-castle on the Florida coast; his jailer will one day teach his son at the Carlisle Indian School. We continue to meet Jude's inheritors (the provided family tree is key) and then it is 2018, and Jude's teenage great-great-great grandson Orvil is recovering from the climactic events of There There. Orvil's wicked pain, and increasing need for medication to numb it, lead to Sean, recuperating from injury himself, who has access to homemade painkillers. Orvil's grandmothers and brothers have struggles of their own. All this barely scratches the surface of Orange's tender yet eviscerating history of a family's survival—day to day, generation to generation—and their uneasy yet persistent belief in that survival. Their story, one character realizes, has to be lived in order to be told, it is the song being sung, the dancer in midair, and, indeed, there is so much life in this mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic novel.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: There, There was a lauded best-seller and readers will be thrilled to see anything from Orange, especially a continuation of that beloved story. Copyright 2024 Booklist Reviews.
Library Journal Reviews
Star, a young survivor of 1864's Sand Creek Massacre (in present-day Colorado), is held at the Fort Marion Prison Castle and compelled to eschew his language and heritage by a brutal prison guard—as is Star's son Charles a generation later, at the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians. Charles survives with the help of fellow student Opal Viola, whose own story brings us to 2018 Oakland and events in Orange's Pulitzer Prize finalist, mega-award-winning There There. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2023 Library Journal
Copyright 2023 Library Journal.
Library Journal Reviews
This follow-up to Orange's debut novel, There There, delivers a considerably different reading experience than its progenitor. Moving away from that earlier novel's vast, intricately woven tapestry of interconnections, Orange narrows his focus to the lineage and immediate family of There There's Orvil Red Feather, beginning with his great-great-great-grandfather in the 1800s and continuing until 2018, where most of the narrative takes place, examining the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. But it isn't just the novel's construction that changes shape. Orange forgoes the explosive tragedy that punctuated his first novel and instead documents its lingering distension. It's a potent and intimate pivot, one that builds in power as he mines the abiding grief of childhood's passage, particularly within the contexts of Indigenous history and contemporaneity. This second work lacks the sense of sprawl that invigorated Orange's debut, and there are stretches in the central section that can feel pulled too thin and blunted by repetition, leaving its three parts a bit wobbly in balance. But, as was the case with There There, he builds to a memorable crescendo. VERDICT Orange smartly avoids the trap of attempting the same trick twice, tweaking his approach to story and structure and once again showcasing his ability to deliver characters with clear, complex interiority.—Luke Gorham
Copyright 2024 Library Journal.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Orange follows up his PEN/Hemingway-winning There There with a stirring portrait of the fractured but resilient Bear Shield-Red Feather family in the wake of the Oakland powwow shooting that closed out the previous book. The sequel is wider in scope, beginning with stories of the family's ancestors before catching up to the present. Those ancestors include Jude Star, who barely survives the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in what is now Colorado as a youth and is sent to a prison in St. Augustine, Fla., where he's forced to learn English and read the Bible. Jude later works as a farmhand in Oklahoma and raises his son Charles, who is sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. As a young man in the early 1900s, Charles drifts into San Francisco, where he becomes addicted to morphine while contending with the trauma of forced assimilation and unspecified abuse at Carlisle ("There is something deeper down, doing its dark work on him some further forgotten thing, but what is it? His life is about knowing it is there but not ever wanting to see it"). In the present, high school freshman Orvil Red Feather recovers at home in Oakland after being struck by a stray bullet during the powwow. Like Charles, he becomes addicted to opiates and struggles to connect with his cultural identity after his grandmother neglects to share details about their Cheyenne heritage. With incandescent prose and precise insights, Orange mines the gaps in his characters' memories and finds meaning in the stories of their lives. This devastating narrative confirms Orange's essential place in the canon of Native American literature. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi, Inc. (Mar.)
Copyright 2023 Publishers Weekly.