There There

This book will stay in my heart and mind. The characters are so real that I was tearing up by the end as he tied all of their stories together. I know some have said it started slowly for them, but I was hooked from the beginning and was turning back to check stories to see the clever interconnections. What an impressive debut. He'll be in Durham this week and I'm very much looking forward to hearing him speak about his work.

This is the most powerful book I've read this year (and I've read some weighty stuff). The book weaves together narratives from different Natives in the Oakland area, from all perspectives – different ages, genders, and families – but also different literary perspectives, from the first person to second to third and in every tense imaginable. Orange is trying to get at this from every angle. He's making us look at every surface in every way; it's a true cubist manifesto, putting together these different pieces until the reader can see the full picture. And then see the picture shatter. (My heart is still reeling.)

Forget Hawthorne and Shakespeare and Orwell – this book should be required reading for all high school kids. Because rectifying what we teach elementary school kids about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims with historical accounts of the Trail of Tears and various massacres in high school textbooks isn't nearly enough. That still allows us to be so distant from the tragedy of this people; textbook images are “a copy of a copy of a photograph” – so far from the real thing. Distant, cold, impersonal. We can understand the tragedy logically and never come close to feeling it. Read this book and you'll feel it.

It's not historical fiction; it's set in the modern day. But at the same time it is a historical fiction, because each of the characters in this story carries the weight of the past, and feel doomed to continue carrying that weight because we refuse to acknowledge those histories, right the wrongs, and refuse to let the Native people fade into an ethnically ambiguous urbanity. Please – start by reading this book.

One sentence synopsis... Set in modern-day Oakland and alternating perspectives amongst a dozen Native and mixed race characters this novel builds tension through deeply personal stories until the climactic big Oakland powwow. .

Read it if you like... modern history and stories of identity like (the previously favorably reviewed) ‘The Great Believers'. .

Dream casting... Gil Birmingham as the devoted Bill Davis and Chaske Spencer as the loner Edwin Black.

The stories in this book where quite interesting, and the characters were good (though I struggled to tell them apart at times). Unfortunately I think there were a few too many characters. It spread the story too thin over many themes, all of which are deep, sensitive, important topics that need focused attention. I would have liked a deeper exploration of these things, and I think the frequent perspective change somewhat hindered that. I didn't love the change in narrative style, which causes the reader to readjust too often to a new writing style. I know there's likely a reason for this that I have completely missed, so I recommend checking out other more eloquent (and academic) reviews than mine. I also recommend looking for Own Voices reviews of this book because I have likely missed very important things in my review. What I did like was the ease of reading this book. It painted a very good picture and was very accessible.

For Native Americans living on reservations in a community that includes elders, a sense of connection with the past is probably deeply tangible. But of course, that's not where all Native Americans live. Plenty of them live in cities, and it's an attempt to put together a pow-wow in Oakland that brings together the characters of Tommy Orange's debut novel, There There. Through changing point-of-view chapters from a wide cast, the book tells the story of how the pow-wow brings people together in unexpected ways...and what happens when a group of young men eye the prize money for the dance competition as a target for robbery. Common throughout are the questions the characters have about identity, and what it means to be an Indian in a large city.

The character wrestling most with identity and meaning is Dene Oxendene, who wins a competition for grant money that he intends to use to record Indian people telling their own stories about their lives. He sees the pow-wow as an opportunity to film many people at once. But there's also Edwin, whose interest in participating in the event, and breaking out of his self-imposed social isolation, is sparked by the discovery of his Indian father via social media. The internet is also how teenage Orvil tries to connect with his culture, as his stern grandmother Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield (who was taken to the AIM takeover of Alcatraz as a child, along with her sister Jacquie Red Feather, by their unstable mother) who is raising him and his brothers refuses to talk about being Indian with them. Orvil learns tribal dances from YouTube, and plans to enter the dance competition. But the internet also provides a group of young men (including Tony Loneman, angry at the scorn he's received because of his fetal alcohol syndrome) with the schematics to 3D print guns from plastic that could be snuck past the metal detectors at the pow-wow, so they can get money to remedy a drug deal gone wrong.

Tommy Orange is a dazzling talent and this is a very good book. I would say that the only thing holding it back from greatness, for me, is that I wished it was told with a more traditional story structure. While each character's perspective was distinct and important, I found it hard to keep track of who everyone was in relation to everyone else, and a more well-delineated central narrative thread would have, for me, made the book's impact even more powerful. But the reality is that it's powerful anyways. I really cannot overstate how good Orange's writing is. These characters feel like they actually exist in the world, like each one of them, no matter how small a part they play, have full lives and histories that we're only able to get hints of. He switches back and forth between first- and third-person perspective, and even writes one chapter in the second person, which didn't add anything narratively as far as I was concerned as much as feeling like the exuberance of an artist pushing at the boundaries of what he can do.

In a way, this felt like an answer to one of the most well-known writers of Native American adult literature today: Louise Erdrich. While Erdrich's work focuses primarily on women, particularly older women, on reservations in the northern Great Plains, Orange's novel highlights men, especially young men, in a large Californian city. What they share is a story structure in which there are multiple characters that are the focus of one chapter at a time in a non-chronological narrative, as well as a focus on how to live in the world as an Indian today. Erdrich, who has won the National Book Award and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is a big name to invite comparisons with, but Orange lives up to it. This book is a must-read, and I can't wait to see what Tommy Orange does next.

I was discussing this with a colleague/friend, and we stumbled into “gobsmacking” being the most-right word for Orange's astounding prologue, and that's how I felt about the especially stunning, agonizing, beautiful last chapter, too. Lots and lots of other beautiful/powerful moments throughout, and this strikes me above all as a love letter to Orange's community (both people and place). A favorite quote: “Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

There There is one of my favorite books written about the Native experience. It touches on different experiences and different realities of the modern native American without (at least to my knowledge) contributing to stereotypes. I loved learning about native culture and I loved the way the narratives weaved together with the culmination at the Pow Wow.

I think this book was a little too literary for me. The writing was good, the characters were interesting, and I think I learned a lot. I think it is important to read and write about Native American people and their experiences. However, the closing chapter was a bit of a flop for me and I don't think any of the characters will stay with me.

I have no idea how to pull my thoughts together and review this coherently. My brain was still trying to puzzle it out while I fell asleep, in my dreams, and upon waking. Also, right now. 

The information I can give is this is sad, and maaaaaybe a little hopeful. There are a ton of POV characters and secondary characters to keep track of, and they're largely not interacting with one another, at least not until the end. However best you remember characters and keep them straight is that I'm advising here. 

There, There's ending leaves a lot of questions unanswered and so be prepared for it not to be wrapped up in a neat bow. 

The writing was so good! Sad and poetic, a little funny, a little foreboding. 

Read for a school assignment. It was a very rough piece, as it's based on the Native American experience. I wasn't sure how it would go at first, since there were multiple perspectives (too many imo because they start to blend together) but it had me crying by the end.

Also what was that ending?? I wanted to know the aftermath but was left with ambiguity.

I love the idea of this book and reading about Native Americans. Their mistreatment was succinctly described and formed the basis for the contemporary story that followed. I found the characters and plot interesting, but there was so much going on for such a short book, I never felt like I got invested in the characters. The writing is good, so this may be your cup of tea. It was only a so-so read for me.

I have had this Advanced Reader Copy of There There for almost a year. I started it soon after I first got it, read a chapter, and put it down; I sensed this would be a powerful book, and I wasn't ready to read it yet. I got it back out this week when I realized that Tommy Orange was coming to Houston, and I read and read almost up to the time Orange walked onstage at Rice University in Houston. Last night I read to the end.

What do I think of this book? I feel the same way I did when I read The Things They Carried: sitting in deep admiration for the beauty of the writing and certain of the truth of the words, but, nevertheless, scarred by the reading. I know There There is full of real people—Dene with his storytelling grant inherited from his dead uncle; Tony left damaged by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome; Jacquie raped during the Native American takeover of Alcatraz; and many more—and their stories are deeply real...there is no denying the reality of these stories. The book is afire with a searing blaze of anger directed out at those deemed to have sent these Native Americans into their circle of hell—suffering from poverty, racism, and alcoholism—and somehow, though I've never known a Native American in my life, my presumed status as a white person (whatever that is) makes me somehow liable for the pain. I feel marked by the suffering, the violence, the neediness, the fury of the characters, yet without a way to address it, relieve it, heal it.

I'm glad to have read this book; I hate that I read this book. This book tells the stories of Native Americans who have been silenced too long, and that is a good thing. I feel the pain of these characters; I am left with the pain.

This book was really refreshing and felt so poetic to read from different perspectives and a change in writing styles to get inside of their thoughts.

For historical fiction, I really appreciated the integration of historical events. This world makes me so sad, I didn't know about Thanksgiving origins and beheadings of peoples body parts in jars. Colonel Chivington and his role in the Sand Creek Masscare was absolutely disgusting. I'm so angry how Indians have been treated it disgusts me how people continue to gloss over harm in our history simply for “tradition sake.”

The explanation behind the Indian-head test pattern left me in shock. We brush over all of these horrifying parts of history in public classrooms, but it's the truth. Why are people so afraid of talking about the bloody parts of history?

The topics of self identity and not being Indian enough or trying to reconnect with your blood and the culture was so relatable. I loved that these stories spanned vast experiences, and shared the beauty of various tribes and cultural customs and traditions, across various generations all the way from Alcatraz island to contemporary day in Oakland.

This book made me so sad but I really loved how connected to Tony I felt, especially the ending.

oh my gosh, this is so good. It's a novel told through an interlinking set of stories/chapters about a large cast of characters, all of whom are American Indians, and I found each character so compelling that I was simultaneously mad and excited every time a POV changed, I'd read a full book about each of them individually. UGH so beautiful on a sentence level and so powerful on a story level.

Multi-POV book following the stories of Native Americans, some struggling with their identity of what it means to be a Native American, as they come together for a powwow in Oakland. I found it a bit hard at times to keep up with the different characters and how they are all connected to each other. Perhaps it would have been better as a longer book, or with less characters, but nonetheless pretty solid.

Stories of urban Indians, all converging towards a big Pow Wow in Oakland. We meet multiple generations of Native Americans, all struggling with questions of identity. Far from reservations, we meet torn-apart families, feelings of regret, a meta story about recording stories. It all results in a big portrait of what it must feel like to exist in this modern-day society, that has run off, killed and mistreated your people for centuries.

The storytelling is great, I just wish he'd maybe split it into fewer characters. And maybe not have it end on such a negative event.

I very much enjoyed how this book managed to spin several stories at once, all culminating to one event. I think Orange puts a lot of character development into a small amount of pages - some can't achieve a vision of a character with 300 pages by themself. Orange can do so much with so little. I loved reading this and I want all my friends to read it.

A polyphonic story narrated from a dozen perspectives. When I started I thought they were separate short stories as they were so divergent. Orange starts closing the circle as the characters slowly begin to converge on an Oakland pow-wow. And you realize the gun he brings in the first act is bound to go off.

I love the idea of the urban Indian. Orange gets us off the reservation and places his characters in the city. And maybe it's me missing the narrative plentitude of indigenous writing but it felt relevant and strangely present. And it's placed within a larger context, with Orange briefly leaving the narrative in a searing prologue and interlude to drop some knowledge.

I loved how Orange talked about the dancers too, feathers shaking, shoulders dipping, like gravity meant something different to them.

A stunning debut and a much needed win for indigenous writers after all the recent scandals surrounding Boyden and Alexie. Reviewed here: https://youtu.be/ZZvx3rbjLzk