Where: The Lost Druid Brewery, 2866 Washington Street in Avondale Estates
When: Thursday, October 17 at 7 p.m.
Why: To discuss the latest novel by Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange.
The Midway Woods Book Club meets regularly to discuss books of interest to the group. Book Club participants vote on which book to read next, and then meet up to discuss what they’ve read and enjoy each others’ company.
It’s not too late to join in for our next book! New members are always welcome!
If you’d like to join the club, just send an email to midwaywoodscommunications@gmail.com and let us know you’d like to join! Just email us if you’d like to get in on the fun!
Slated for October is a discussion of the novel Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange.
Orange, author of the breakout bestseller There There (“Pure soaring beauty.”The New York Times Book Review) delivers a follow-up to his first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“For the sake of knowing, of understanding, Wandering Stars blew my heart into a thousand pieces and put it all back together again. This is a masterwork that will not be forgotten, a masterwork that will forever be part of you.” —Morgan Talty, bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez
About the book:
“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.”
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award.