There There by Tommy Orange
There There by Tommy Orange
"Orange's stunning debut novel ensures that he will take his place alongside our best Native American authors... but unlike many of their stories, this tale is set not on a reservation, but in a city, among urban Indians. Orange introduces us to twelve different characters, all of whom are traveling to Oakland for a powwow and grappling with what the "Indian"" identity means top them. Orange addresses their shared legacy of hardship and violence in complex, often surprising ways, and the result is powerful, beautiful, and truly memorable. - Recommended by Erika
Fierce, angry, funny, heartbreaking--Tommy Orange's first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen, and it introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career.
There There is a relentlessly paced multigenerational story about violence and recovery, memory and identity, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. It tells the story of twelve characters, each of whom have private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and unspeakable loss.Here is a voice we have never heard--a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with stunning urgency and force. Tommy Orange writes of the plight of the urban Native American, the Native American in the city, in a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. An unforgettable debut, destined to become required reading in schools and universities across the country.