Cheri's Reviews > The Overstory

4.5 Stars

“We lived on a street where the tall elm shade
Was as green as the grass and as cool as a blade
That you held in your teeth as we lay on our backs
Staring up at the blue and the blue stared back

“I used to believe we were just like those trees
We'd grown just as tall and as proud as we pleased
With our feet on the ground and our arms in the breeze
Under a sheltering sky”
-- Only a Dream, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Songwriters: Mary Chapin Carpenter


”First there was nothing. Then there was everything.”


”First there was nothing. Then there was everything.”

”The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.”

I say, Richard Powers’ Overstory is something you need to read. I’d like to leave it at that and believe that you might actually read it, because I’m not sure I have words that would do justice to this, and at the same time my mind and heart are jumbled in thoughts and I’m still somewhere inside the pages of this book, trying to hold onto that feeling for just a bit longer.

This begins with a short chapter that has the feeling of a biblical tale, with perhaps a touch of magical realism to it. The meaning, the cycle of life, but also the life lessons that we are somehow missing, unable to grasp.

”A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.”

This is divided into sections, with the second section sharing Nicholas Hoel’s story, as the young Jørgen Hoel, among others, throws his stone into the tree to bring down the chestnuts, over and over. A free-fall of food in this still young country. Later that night, he will propose to Vi, a young Irish girl, and they marry before Christmas, and will move ”through the great tracts of eastern white pine, into the dark beech forests of Ohio, across the Midwestern oak breaks, and out to the settlement near Fort Des Moines in the new state of Iowa, where the authorities give away land platted yesterday to anyone who will farm it..

It’s not an easy life, but they make it through the first winter, and by the time it is time to plant again, Vi is pregnant. When Hoel comes across the six chestnuts he had put in his pocket the night he proposed to Vi, he ”presses them into the earth of western Iowa, on the treeless prairie around the cabin.”

Hundreds of miles away from the native range of chestnuts, further still from Prospect Hill, but he has hope for the future, for their future.

His son will record the growth of the one tree that remains many years later with a Kodak No. 2 Brownie camera, every month from the same spot and the time of day. His personal ritual, a ritual that for him feels holy, like the sacrament of communion.

There are many other character’s stories that eventually become somewhat intertwined, but at the root of all of these stories is this reverence for trees, so much so in some of these stories that they act as one of the characters.

From the beginning, this is lovely, even though there were minor parts of this story I didn’t enjoy quite as much as others. There were times when I felt a point was being driven home again and again, which took away some of what I loved about this story, and occasionally it felt heavy and dense, for me, especially later in the book, but ultimately, this is one I won’t forget.



Many thanks for the ARC provided by W.W. Norton & Company