luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus)'s Reviews > The Tree Doctor

dnf 10%

kudos to this book for inducing so many eye rolls on my part in such little time. yet another novel that portrays contemporary humanities students as privileged snowflakes with zero media literacy and who refuse to engage with materials depicting 'troubling' things and whose criticism of said materials can be boiled down to their inability to realize or concede that portrayal doesn't mean endorsement. of course, in this novel the snowflake in question is a white blonde, who is 'triggered' by the rapes occurring in the tale of genji. our narrator is puzzled by this! it doesn't compute! young ppl are so self-centered that even in their analysis of a piece of media they have to make it about themselves! that we have a voice of reason amidst the sheep, a student who knows of a thing called historical context!

sure, some students/young ppl are or perform oversensitivity, so why not have fiction poking fun of them (there is a scene in american fiction that does so quite effectively). but here the author's knee-jerk reaction over the word triggering and the notion of trigger warnings makes that whole class scene seem both simplistic and inaccurate. when someone says "this book is triggering" or "this book should have trigger warnings" they are not saying "this book is bad" or "this book should be banned/censored/cancelled". the author's feelings about this whole thing are quite obvious, yet, the narrator of their novel pretends to puzzle things over, but in way that feels entirely performative and condescending. the icing on the cake is having a student say something along the lines of : "we can't read this book like it's a 19th century exploration of the psyche this book is before a time before anyone was worried about being a girl-boss..." dio mio.

this lazy portrayal of gen-zers and young millennials falls flat for me as a reader. if you're going to mock them, at least do it without broadcasting the fact that you're several generations removed from their experiences and have a limited interest in understanding their perspectives. or, elevate said scene with something. but the scenes unfolds in such a predictable way as to make its contents all the more shallow. this was neither a witty nor a keenly-observed depiction of academia. the dialogues are stilted and do not ring true to life and the storytelling is uninspired.

even if the contents of the novel had not annoyed me, i would have felt little interest in continuing this book. the writing is awkward and the pacing is off. we have this opening scene that feels all over the place, despite doing very little.

if this novel is on your radar i encourage you to look up more positive reviews. my thoughts are based only on a small portion of a book, so it may very well be that the novel is not what i made it out to be.