The Overstory

I’d been meaning to read this for a couple years, mostly because I kept hearing it described as a book about trees the way Moby-Dick is a book about a whale, technically true and missing the point. It’s nine separate character threads, each connected to trees in some way, that slowly braid together around environmental activism and the question of what a person owes to something that outlives them by centuries.

Some of these threads landed much harder than others for me. The engineer-turned-activist storyline and the artist who starts painting the same tree over decades both stuck with me, specific and grounded in a way that made the environmental themes feel earned rather than lectured. A couple of the other threads felt thinner, more vehicle-for-theme than actual character, and I found myself impatient to get back to the stronger ones.

Here’s the odd part, I happened to be reading a nonfiction book about tree communication and root networks around the same time, purely by accident, and the parallels between the two were strange enough that I kept setting one down to check something in the other. That’s not really a review point so much as an experience I had, but it changed how I read the book’s more mystical claims about trees, less like magical thinking and more like the novel dramatizing real, if contested, science.

Three stars. It’s ambitious and occasionally beautiful, but nine narrators is a lot to sustain evenly across five hundred pages, and this one has real peaks alongside real valleys rather than a consistently strong read start to finish.