I love this book. I want to begin by saying that.
This is a novel about trees. Well, it's about people, at least in terms of its plotting and characters, but it's the ways in which trees impact and inform those human characters' personal and collective histories that serve as the focus of the story. It's a big, sprawling epic of a novel, beautifully written, and with such rich characterization that even minor side characters who only appear in a single chapter feel like the protagonists of an entire novel. The book follows nine Americans over the course of decades in their lives. Many of them will come together as part of an environmental activist movement in the Pacific Northwest, where ancient forests are being cut down by large timber companies.
Most great nature writing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, reminds us that there's an entire non-human world all around us, bursting with activity and intelligent life that many of us never notice. The term "overstory" refers to the topmost layer of foliage in a forest, the layer which acts as the forest canopy. This novel reminds us that there is indeed an entire story unfolding above our heads, among the trees that we so often take for granted, and that we would all do well to pay attention to it.
