The book to be discussed is "Wandering Stars" by Tommy Orange. Pick up a copy of the book at Martindale-Brightwood. Never attended? We would love to have you!
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange is available as a print book, e-book, downloadable audiobook, a preloaded audiobook, a large print book, and as a Book Club Kit in the Library's collection.
"Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star's son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father's jailer. Under Pratt's harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines. Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family. Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage and is a devastating indictment of America's war on its own people."
The Brightwood Branch opened in 1901 as the sixth public library in Indianapolis. It served the Brightwood community at several locations along Station Street, one street west of its current North Sherman Avenue storefront site which opened in 1972. A 1996 renovation at this location doubled the size of the branch to 5,400 square feet. In 2020, a brand-new branch building, across the street from the previous branch, was completed and re-named as the Martindale-Brightwood Branch.
