Young novelists who write a well-received first book inevitably face high expectations when it comes time to deliver their second. In the case of Tommy Orange, that pressure is only intensified by the fact that his 2018 debut, THERE THERE, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. While not without its flaws, his sophomore effort, WANDERING STARS, turns out to be both a moving family story and an excavation of historic wrongs that reveals how trauma reverberates down through the generations until it must be confronted in the present.

Superficially, WANDERING STARS appears to be two books uneasily joined together. Indeed, it’s only about midway through the novel, which features in its second half several characters who appeared in THERE THERE, that Orange’s narrative strategy starts to emerge. That’s a warning to impatient readers who may be wondering when the story is going to take a recognizable shape to hang on for its plentiful rewards.

"...a moving family story and an excavation of historic wrongs that reveals how trauma reverberates down through the generations until it must be confronted in the present."

Orange opens the novel with the story of a member of the Cheyenne tribe who takes the name Jude Star after surviving the Sand Creek Massacre on November 29, 1864 and two generations of his descendants. In that unprovoked surprise attack, some 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho tribespeople, most of them women, children and the elderly, were slaughtered by U.S. Army forces. In one of the novel’s epigraphs, Orange quotes Theodore Roosevelt, who, while conceding “certain most objectionable details” of the event, went on to describe it as “on the whole as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”

It’s that shameful attitude that informs the treatment of survivors like Jude, who flees Sand Creek with a bullet still lodged in him. After he surrenders to the U.S. military, he’s sent to a “prison-castle” in Florida run by Richard Henry Pratt, a Civil War officer and veteran of the American Indian Wars. Pratt became the founder and first superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school in Pennsylvania whose most famous resident for nine years was athletic legend Jim Thorpe.

Pratt’s odious philosophy was that you “killed the Indian to save the man,” even as he claimed he wanted to “make the country see the worthiness of Indians.” Beginning with personal grooming and clothing, Pratt --- his prejudice cloaked in benevolence --- viewed his job as one that involved erasing all traces of his students’ Native American heritage. Jude’s son, Charles, is a student at the school and dreams of becoming a writer so he can tell his father’s story but struggles in a life that’s marred by his criminal conduct and an addiction to laudanum.

Whether in the form of a novel or nonfiction, the story of the monstrosity that was the Carlisle School is one that deserves to be told by a writer of Tommy Orange’s talent, much as Colson Whitehead did to a similarly horrific institution in his novel, THE NICKEL BOYS. The fact that Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, chose not to tell that story in full here might engender some disappointment. But in fairness, that’s not the book he’s chosen to write.

Instead, about a third of the way through the novel, Orange abruptly --- and at first jarringly --- shifts to his hometown of Oakland, California, in 2018. It’s there that Orvil Red Feather is recovering from a gunshot wound he received at the Big Oakland Powwow that ended THERE THERE. Like his ancestor Jude Star, the bullet remains precariously lodged in his body. Orvil lives, along with his brothers Loother and Lony, in the home of their great-aunt Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield. She has assumed at least informal custody of the boys after their grandmother has disappeared and their mother, a drug addict, died by suicide.

Orange skillfully shifts viewpoints among the members of this loving but troubled family to reveal how both the personal and historic pasts echo in their lives. At the Catholic high school that Opal, a mail carrier, has borrowed money to enable him to attend, Orvil befriends a fellow student, Sean Price, whose father runs a drug laboratory in the basement of his home. Together, the boys slip into a life of addiction and drug dealing that echoes the travails of Orvil’s ancestor, Charles. Both Orvil and Sean, who’s the brown-skinned adoptee of a white family and whose 23andMe DNA test reveals some intriguing information about his genetic heritage, live with the pain of losing their mothers in childhood. Each must consider how the trauma of the Native American past is reflected in their lives.

As Orvil recognizes, “[S]ome wounds were bottomless holes asking to be filled every day,” an apt summary of the struggles of the Star, Red Feather and Bear Shield families. WANDERING STARS is a story of survival, but as Opal reflects, “[S]urviving wasn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.”

But for all its darkness, Orange chooses to end the novel on a note of hope, with Orvil’s brother Lony’s wish that they may “learn to forgive ourselves, so that we lose the weight, so that we might fly, not as birds but as people, get above the weight and carry on, for the next generations, so that we might keep living, stop doing all this dying.” It’s a thought that serves as a kind of benediction, even as the story it concludes is far from reaching its end.