Best of the Best Book Club: “There, There” by Tommy Orange

The Coronado Public Library’s Best of the Best Book Club meets regularly on the fourth Wednesday of each month to discuss books that have won major awards.

For our October meeting, we will discuss the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award winner There, There by Tommy Orange, a wondrous and shattering 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.

Place this title on hold via our online catalog, or check out the e-book through the CloudLibrary app.

About There, There

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. 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 heroism

A 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). It is fierce, funny, suspenseful, and impossible to put down — full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.