I love a book that shifts something in your brain. That you look up from and the world seems just a little bit different, or it's almost like you can see more clearly things that blurred before. Orange starts doing that right from the beginning of THERE THERE, with a prologue about Indians--about Natives not just to America but Canada and Central America. He then spins his tale of the urban Indians in Oakland, California, through the perspectives of several characters. Most are trying to understand their personal identities against what history and their families and communities tell them they are (or are not).

The characters are all wonderfully realized; the book made me equal parts laugh and cry, but mostly think. The novel culminates in its fourth and final section as all these characters come together for a powwow in an Oakland sports stadium. The build to this event was fraught with tension, and I was clinging this book to my chest after I finished it, learning the fates of these favorites.

I am immensely impressed with Orange and his ability to craft a story that's rich in its details of history but set precisely in today's world. And it makes me look at my world with that prism, too. When I watched the new Coen Brother's movie 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,' I thought of THERE THERE. At Thanksgiving, I looked around at my family's 50+ person family reunion in new light. A few months ago, when my mom's ancestry.com research showed that her mother came from Natives Panamanians and her father came from Spaniards, I didn't really think of what that meant, historically, until THERE THERE.

A paradigm shift; a new look at an old world.