Diane Barnes's Reviews > The Overstory

This is quite possibly the most amazing thing I've ever read. It's brilliant, passionate, terrifying and painful. It's too long, it's difficult to read, there are too many characters to follow....and yet, those characters are all of us, at some point in our lives. Let's just say this is The War and Peace of nature.
The novel begins with the story of a chestnut tree in Iowa. It escaped the east coast chestnut blight by virtue of having been brought west in the pocket of a Swedish emigrant. If you can read this beginning chapter without emotion, you're a harder person than I am. Each succeeding chapter is about a person or persons whose lives were changed by a tree, until the book branches off into their efforts to save the Redwoods in California and Oregon. The preceding sentence is a simplistic effort on my part to explain the plot. In reality, this novel can't be explained because it contains worlds, and the creation and destruction of worlds, battles between environmentalists and scientists who see what's happening, and corporations and lawyers who don't care as long as there's one more cent of profit to be made.

This particular novel is about trees and forests, but the same thing is happening to our oceans and rivers and coastlines. Build more houses and condos and roads, allow offshore drilling for oil, because there are more and more of us, and we all need more and more stuff.
If you can read to the end of this novel without fear of what we have done to this earth, and what is yet to come, then you didn't pay attention. The saddest thing of all is that the ones who need the message the most will never read this book, and wouldn't understand it if they did. I don't know how to fix that. Maybe the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize will get more readers for The Overstory. Maybe teachers can make it required school reading. Maybe it's too late.............