There There

A Novel

No cover

Tommy Orange: There There (2019, Penguin Random House)

304 pages

English language

Published 2019 by Penguin Random House.

ISBN:
978-1-78470-797-2
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3 stars (2 reviews)

"Not since Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine has such a powerful and urgent Native American voice exploded onto the landscape of contemporary fiction. Tommy Orange's There There introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career. "We all came to the powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling threads of our lives got pulled into a braid--tied to the back of everything we'd been doing all along to get us here. There will be death and playing dead, there will be screams and unbearable silences, forever-silences, and a kind of time-travel, at the moment the gunshots start, when we look around and see ourselves as we are, in our regalia, and something in our blood will recoil then boil hot enough to burn through time and place and memory. We'll go back to where we came from, …

16 editions

Constructed, too many characters

2 stars

Disappointed. The writing was immaculate, addressing the plight of Native Americans in cities, Oakland was well represented, but it was sooo constructed. Too many characters, and not clear why, that also all are related or discover connections. Jumps too quickly between characters, and the story becomes very weird in the end.

Subjects

  • Indians of north america, fiction
  • Fiction, political
  • Oakland (calif.), fiction