Update on reflection: I am bumping this down because my issue with the book I think is fundamental to what the story is about. And I still feel bitter about my experience with it, months later.

This is a sprawling book, both in its coverage of time and physical space, as well as perspective. There are quite a few characters, though some are more predominate than others. There’s the inclusion of an old tree that is predominately providing historical exposition.

Overall, I liked this, but I really am adverse to prescriptive storytelling. And this is that. The conclusions you’re supposed to come to, you can’t help but do so, since there is so much repetition of the themes and allegory and metaphor.

It is effective at showing the pain and growth from a literal transplant, both of the tree as well as the people who leave and live elsewhere. You consume the history in an easily digestible way, you see how grief and trauma and love are explored. That all worked for me.

Where it stumbled somewhat (beyond the sort of sophomoric overuse of simile, metaphor, allegory, etc.), is the anthropomorphism of the tree. Our relationship with nature, at a cultural and scientific level, makes it clear that we do not understand creatures all that well, as much as we have fables and folklore about these things. And so, when people endow nature—especially trees, though—with these qualities where it’s more-or-less a person, but of course with a veeeery long memory, it feels kind of weird and fetishistic and incomplete in its thinking of the natural compared to humanity. I am all for natural creatures being endowed with qualities that allow them to participate in stories. But I am not interested in them sort of aping humanity at all. I think it’s denigrating and solipsistic in its own way, and a pet peeve of mine.

This combined with the overuse of humanity directly learning from nature. Needing to rediscover our roots and entrench ourselves in the natural rather than the schizophrenic, cruel societies we have created, creates a kind of dissonance for me. I think it works at conveying the authors intent (many, many times over) but again, kind of reiterates this oversimplification of the natural world existing in a fetishistic quality to be made use of by people. We should pattern ourselves and society to form an equilibrium with nature, absolutely. But that doesn’t mean, in turn, that nature is understood by us. It feels like another sort of colonization of the natural world, basically. Unintentional though it may be.

So, as you maybe can tell, in a very human story, I kept finding myself in the weeds, so to speak. I would settle into the live story or whatever else spiralling out into this multiple perspective piece, and then encounter, invariably, my pet peeves again. I wanted to like this a lot more than I did and I think it’s solely down to the above problems that It didn’t resonate with me as much as it did others. So it goes.

edit: I also think the colonialism reflected in the tree's perspective and anthropomorphism that is antithetical to what the story is about--war, displacement, literally colonialism--in making the tree reflect humanity, rather than nature in most aspects, I think it creates a dissonance that makes it completely unsuccessful.