AP English Literature and Composition

AP Literature & Composition students will be responsible for reading one of the two summer book choices presented below PLUS There There by Tommy Orange.

Summer Book Choices:

Fiction: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
Non-fiction: Educated by Tara Westover

To: Students Enrolled in English 12 AP Literature and Composition for the 2019-20 School Year

From: English Department

In preparation for your work in English 12 AP Literature and Composition next year, the English Department is requiring that you read the following novel:

There There by Tommy Orange

Students are responsible for acquiring the text on their own. We have notified the Montclair Book Center, Watchung Booksellers, Barnes and Noble, and the Montclair Public Library of the reading requirement, so copies should be available to purchase or borrow. You may also purchase a copy, new or used, from an on-line bookseller.

In a review of the novel in the New York Times, Colm Toibin writes, “In Tommy Orange’s “There There,” an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire and dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large and fascinating set of characters.” Toibin adds that “Orange makes Oakland into a “there” that becomes all the more concretely, emphatically and fully so in a novel that deals, in tones that are sweeping and subtle, large-gestured and nuanced, with what the notion of belonging means for Native Americans.”

During the first week of school, students will be discussing the novel and writing an in-class essay. It would be useful, therefore, to take some notes on the novel as you read.

Consider the elements of fiction: character development, plot structure, narrative voice, setting, symbols, imagery, figurative language, and tone.

If you have any questions about this reading assignment before the school year ends, please contact your teacher. If you have questions over the summer, contact Ms. Kim Westervelt at kwestervelt@mpsdnj.us

There There by Tommy Orange

Fierce, angry, funny, heartbreaking—Tommy Orange’s first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen, and it introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career.

There There is a relentlessly paced multigenerational story about violence and recovery, memory and identity, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. It tells the story of twelve characters, each of whom have private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and unspeakable loss.

Here is a voice we have never heard—a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with stunning urgency and force. Tommy Orange writes of the urban Native American, the Native American in the city, in a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. An unforgettable debut, destined to become required reading in schools and universities across the country.

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