Tommy Orange: Wandering Stars

Hi everyone

Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange's second book. It's both a prequel and a sequel to his first book There There which I have read before I restarted this blog.
I read this on my e-reader.

"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."

This one is difficult to review.
The story itself felt real, harrowing, eye-opening. The characters were real people with real struggles, good and bad choices made, people around them and circumstances that influence and change them. 
I loved the generational aspect. Reading about multiple family members and how their life's choices, pain, friendships, trauma, ... influence their children, brothers, ...
But the writing was so bad. Orange jumps from one thing to the next, his prose is almost childish. The characters all blended together because they sounded the same to me, they had the same voice. Orange also switches from first to third person and back; and every time it changed I felt thrown out of the story. 
And the book felt unfinished. It goes too fast from one person to the next. I wanted more time with them, I wanted to find out more about their life. The book was ultimately too shallow and the writing bad enough to make the book forgettable. 

Happy reading!
Helena