The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Orange, Tommy. Wandering Stars. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Tommy Orange's sophomore novel Wandering Stars spans over 100 years of American history and is set in Colorado, Oklahoma, Florida, and California. The novel opens in the Sand Creek region of Colorado in 1864, and traces the experiences of Jude Star in the wake of the Sand Creek Massacre. The novel elapses linearly, and explores the ways in which Jude Star's descendants are all impacted by Jude's childhood trauma. The novel is written from the first, second, and third person points of view and employs both the past and present tenses. For the sake of clarity, the following summary relies upon the present tense and a linear mode of explanation.

When Jude Star is a young boy, American soldiers invade his Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek and massacre his people. Jude manages to escape and spends months wandering on foot trying to survive. He finds a temporary sense of community with a Native man named Bear Shield and his people. Then one day, a white jailer named Richard Henry Pratt captures Jude and 70 other Native people, and takes them to Florida. Pratt inters his Native captives at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He teaches them to read and write and schools them in Christianity. Meanwhile, the school teaches its captives that their Native traditions are evil and depraved.

Jude tries to create a life for himself after his release from the school. He returns to the West and gets married to an Irish woman named Hannah with whom he has a son, Charles Star. When Charles is still little, Jude leaves the family and never returns. Hannah abandons Charles not long later, too. Charles therefore grows up relying upon his friend Opal Viola Bear Shield for comfort. Over the years, they fall in love and make plans to flee and create a new life together. However, Charles dies shortly after Opal gets pregnant with their daughter Victoria Bear Shield. Opal then dies in childbirth and Victoria is taken in by Opal's former employers Mr. and Mrs. Haven. The couple tells Victoria nothing about her Native origins and she does not learn the truth until after Mrs. Haven dies.

Victoria tries to create a life for herself, and later for her two daughters, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather. However, she continues to feel displaced and alone. She falls ill and dies when the girls are still young.

Years later, Jacquie develops a dependence on alcohol. Her addiction worsens when her daughter Jamie Red Feather dies. Because Jacquie cannot raise Jamie's three sons, Orvil, Loother, and Lony Red Feather, her sister Opal takes them in. She establishes a home for them in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, California. Jacquie later joins the family here when she gets sober.

Everything changes for the family when Orvil is injured during a shooting at the Oakland powwow. He becomes addicted to opioids during his recovery and retreats from his home and family. He befriends a boy named Sean Price, who is also part Native and addicted to painkillers. The boys spend all of their time making music and getting high together. Meanwhile, Lony and Loother miss their brother and struggle to navigate their increasingly unsettled home life. After Lony graduates from high school, he leaves on a road trip and never returns. Devastated, Orvil overdoses. His family admits him to the hospital and he manages to survive. He goes to rehab and devotes himself to his sobriety thereafter. Sometime later, the family receives a letter from Lony expressing his desire to reconnect and heal together.