ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—THENEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
WINNER OF THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, GQ, The Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews
NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLER
Tommy Orange’s “groundbreaking, extraordinary” (The New York Times) There There is the “brilliant, propulsive” (People Magazine) story of twelve unforgettable characters, Urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who converge and collide on one fateful day. It’s “the year’s most galvanizing debut novel” (Entertainment Weekly).
As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.
There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It’s “masterful . . . white-hot . . . devastating” (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard—a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it’s destined to be a classic.
Good concept, uneven execution. I really enjoy novels made up of multiple intersecting narratives, but the pitfall is that some are just more compelling than others. With this many perspectives packed into a relatively short novel, I was left feeling like we never truly dove all the way in, and some of the more interesting characters were sacrificed to make room for some who were fairly boring. I think this particularly weakened the ending, which was so climactic but which just didn't quite fit together. There was an attempt at explaining the underlying reasons for robbing the powwow (namely a cycle of abuse of poverty), but it just wasn't as convincing as it could have been. The writing was uneven as well - there were times when it was gorgeous, particularly when it was more lyrical, but the sparser prose style just felt a bit underdeveloped to me. I was okay with the switch between first and third person, but the one second person chapter really threw me off. Some of the characters were so interesting and well-drawn, particularly Jacquie. I did feel like her many family connections were at the heart of the novel and that it lost its focus elsewhere. Definitely a promising debut, but far from perfect.
