There There
Twelve Native Americans converging on an Oakland powwow. Orange's debut begins with an essay on the history of violence against Native peoples that is itself one of the great pieces of American writing, and the novel earns that opening.
Twelve point-of-view characters is a lot to track, and more than one reader says the design just did not work for them, one writing plainly, “The structure of the book didn't work for me”. A related complaint says the cast, despite each getting a distinct voice on paper, ends up blurring together instead, and one reviewer puts it bluntly: “they simultaneously collapse into one”. Another calls the prose itself “It's pretty sloppy”, describing short paragraphs that read as disconnected rather than intentionally fragmented. The climax at the powwow draws its own strain, all twelve threads converging fast, and one reader jokes that “900,000 things happened in it” in the space of a few chapters.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
