NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There ("Pure soaring beauty."The New York Times Book Review) delivers a masterful follow-up to his already ...

Oh, Tommy Orange. When we read There There, a book NUBClub generally liked, our main criticism was that there were just too many stories and the book would have been aided with more focus on the best characters and parts. One hopes that a second novel would correct the issues of the first, but in this case, we've gone the opposite way instead. Orange is certainly a skilled writer; there are a number of small moments where Orange reflects on Indigenous experience in an insightful, fresh, and powerful way that moved us to pure praise. But what he is not good at is plotting, and this trips him up in two ways. First, the book is divided into two sections: the history of Opal's family that leads to the characters we followed in There There and then a view of that family after the powwow shooting. Most of us found the first section about the kidnapping of Indigenous children for re-education really compelling, notably in Orange's deft analysis of the complexity and the ambiguity of those kids' understanding of the schools and their heritage. Everyone wanted that to be the entire book. But in the second section we abruptly cut to Sean and Orvil becoming addict friends and dropping out of school. Sean is potentially an interesting character in Orange's wheelhouse -- a person discovering possible Indigenous roots through genetic testing and then struggling to understand what that means for their identity -- but Orange instead focuses on how Sean's father became a drug dealer. And while an addict story is not inappropriate in the context of the culture or the backstory, it's just not that original or interesting. It just feels like the whole novel becomes adrift as we reach the present, focused on weird tangents like the relationship between drugs and movement and odd behaviors Opal's children exhibit. It's not so much that it didn't make sense that Orange would explore the trauma of the family after the shooting, but frankly none of it is compelling and it has no connection to the earlier stories of the novel other than a vague idea of intergeneration trauma. We ultimately felt the same way finishing Wandering Stars as we did reading There There -- that Orange should have had an editor to cut a bunch of the unnecessary content -- only in this book that would be more than half of the pages. It's just not a good story. We still respect Orange and think he's got good writing in him, but wow does he need to figure out how to focus in the next novel. Just read There There. This one is not worth the time.