Blue, who was given up for adoption, travels to Oklahoma in an attempt to learn about her family, only to return to Oakland as the powwow's coordinator.

Others, like Edwin Black and Orvil Red Feather, view the gathering as a way to connect with ancestry and, in Edwin's case, to meet his father for the first time. Tony Loneman and Octavio Gomez see the powwow as an opportunity to pay off drug debts via a brazen robbery. Bouncing between voices and points of view, Orange introduces 12 characters, their plotlines hinging on things like 3-D printed handguns and VR-controlled drones. Orange's commanding debut chronicles contemporary Native Americans in Oakland, as their lives collide in the days leading up to the city's inaugural Big Oakland Powwow. There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable. It is fierce, funny, suspenseful, and impossible to put down-full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force.

They converge and collide on one fateful day at the Big Oakland Powwow and together this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American-grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroismĪ book with “so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it’s a revelation” ( The New York Times). Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. A contemporary classic, this “astonishing literary debut” (Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale) “places Native American voices front and center before readers’ eyes” (NPR/ Fresh Air).Īmong them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind.

A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BESTSELLER

There there tommy orange full book