When they first came for us with their bullets, we didn't stop moving even though the bullets moved twice as fast as the sound of our screams, and even when their heat and speed broke our skin, shattered our bones, skulls, pierced our hearts, we kept on, even when we saw the bullets send our bodies flailing through the air like flags, like the many flags and buildings that went up in place of everything we knew this land to be before. The bullets were premonitions, ghosts from dreams of a hard, fast future. The bullets moved on after moving through us, became the promise of what was to come, the speed and the killing, the hard, fast lines of borders and buildings. They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies now.
(From the prologue)

When I initially posted that I was reading There There, I had so many people reach out to me just to say that they love it and that it was one of their favourite reads of the last few years. When I finished reading the prologue (which is where the quote at the beginning of this review is from) I settled in, convinced that I was soon going to be joining this book's packed bandwagon.

Tommy Orange's debut (a fact which is still dizzying to me) follows multiple characters of Native descent who are united in the fact that they are soon attending a powwow in Oakland, each for very different reasons - some of them are organisers, others are participants, one is interviewing attendees for a project, and some are there with sinister intentions. Each chapter focuses on a different character, detailing their past, their traumas, their struggles, and their relationship with their heritage and culture. Earlier this month I read a book called The Other Americans by Laila Lalami, which is written in a similar way to There There, where each chapter is written from a different character's perspective. In that book, I felt that there wasn't enough distinction between the voices and they sort of bled into one, but here, they are easily distinguishable from one another. You really come to know these people and that only makes the climax of the book all the more hard hitting and powerful.

The way in which Orange writes about Native heritage, particularly that of inherited trauma, is truly stellar - some of these characters are biracial, and there is a wonderful moment in the book where a character whose father was Native and his mother white looks at his skin and muses on the fact that both races are a part of him when one contributed to the massacre and erasure of the other. Orange talks about how as an individual of Native heritage, there is a sense of being born with trauma and loss - their family history riddled with gaps and overwhelmed with violence, and how this affects those living in present day America. A lot of these characters are struggling with alcoholism, abuse, crime, broken families, and Orange details how these issues echo and repeat themselves over and over again through the generations.

Marlon James described this book as 'a thunderclap' and I completely agree with that sentiment. It really shook me up and firmly reminded me that I needed to educate myself more and actively look for books from Native voices, past and present. I can't wait to see what Tommy Orange writes next.