There There by Tommy Orange

"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, when we were people running from bullets at the end of that old world. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, that we've been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, only to die in the grass wearing feathers." Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame in Oakland. Dene Oxedrene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle's memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father. Bobby Big Medicine has come to drum the Grand Entry. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather; Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the Big Oakland Powwow to dance in public for the very first time. Tony Loneman is a young Native American boy whose future seems destined to be as bleak as his past, and he has come to the Powwow with darker intentions--intentions that will destroy the lives of everyone in his path. Fierce, angry, funny, groundbreaking--Tommy Orange's first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. There There is a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. A glorious, unforgettable debut"--

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.