Review: There There

There There by Tommy Orange
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an interesting, if strange novel. It is another in my series of Indigenous novels that I'm reading for my Indigenous Voices (English) course I'm teaching this year. Unlike many of the one's I've read, this one is American, although that makes less difference than you'd think.

The novel is pretty episodic, being told from the voices of about a dozen characters, who all find themselves, by the end of a novel, at a pow-wow in southern California which experiences a bungled robbery (I won't say more to avoid spoilers). The structure is pretty diffuse because the story is told in short chapters in the voices of many characters, so the unravelling of the plot is confusing sometimes, especially because the stories of perpetrators, eye-witnesses and victims are all intertwined and take time to figure out the relationships behind them. But the characters are compelling, so it kept my attention quite well.

This is a good novel, if a little harrowing. But definitely worth reading.

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