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There There
a novel
448 pages
A fiercely urgent chorus of voices hurtling toward a devastating and unforgettable convergence.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like watching a storm gather on the horizon—you can feel the electricity in the air long before the first strike. It is a fiercely urgent, polyphonic experience that pulls you into the messy, vibrant, and fractured lives of its sprawling cast. The prose is kinetic and raw, crackling with a rhythmic energy that makes the pages fly by even as the emotional weight of intergenerational trauma and urban displacement settles heavily in your chest. As the disparate threads of these characters' lives begin to braid together, the pacing accelerates from a steady, character-driven exploration into a propulsive, dread-soaked sprint. It will deeply resonate with readers who love sprawling, multi-perspective literary fiction that balances unflinching realism with profound, beating-heart humanity.
- Mood
- tense
- electric
- melancholic
- dread-soaked
- Tone
- urgent
- unflinching
- polyphonic
- raw
- poignant
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- urban Native identity · intergenerational trauma · addiction and recovery · fractured families · the weight of history · survival
- The writing
- Kinetic, rhythmic, and fiercely contemporary, blending sharp realism with moments of profound, poetic reflection.
- The arc
- Begins as a sprawling, fragmented exploration of disconnected lives and accelerates into a devastating, explosive convergence.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave multi-perspective literary fiction that tackles systemic issues and historical ghosts with raw, beating-heart humanity.
Content notes
- gun violence
- addiction
- alcoholism
- domestic abuse
- racism
- suicide
About the book
"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"--
Description from Open Library.
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