Thought Train to Pusan

This novel ended up on my to-read list last year after it was a Cannonball featured review. I can definitely understand why so many have spoken so highly of it, and am sure this won’t be the last we hear of Tommy Orange in the years to come.  While presented as one complete novel of converging stories, There There reads almost like a collection of short stories, with different threads connecting each of the characters: that is, until everything comes to a head at the end of the story. Starting with a historical essay from Orange explaining “brief and jarring vignettes revealing the violence and genocide that Indigenous people have endured, and how it has been sanitized over the centuries,” we are presented with context and generational history of the lives of the characters we are about to meet; although fictional, it draws from reality. The novel then invites the reader to experience little snippets of the lives of 12 different Native Americans living in the Oakland area, and all ...