Always Pouting's Reviews > The Overstory

I'm actually not quite sure how I felt about this one but also spoilers are going to follow before anyone gets angry at me.

The book starts out by telling what are seemingly separate stories about a variety of characters, so at first I thought it was just going to be a collection of short stories. That felt sort of confusing though because we met about 9 or 10 characters in like the first 100-150 pages and the book itself is 500 pages; I just thought to myself is this a collection of 50 short stories. Eventually though the stories seem to converge together.

When the stories come together though there are still a few characters who don't directly interact, or when they do it's in a very brief way. There's also a lot of ambiguity through out the book on a few things. For one thing it's implied that Olivia is Ray and Dorothy's daughter but they are supposedly childless. Eventually it's also implied that the chestnut tree in their backyard is their daughter so perhaps Olivia is a human avatar for the tree itself. There was also this implication that Patricia commits suicide when she's speaking at the conference but there's never any kind of confirmation of the fact. There's also a convergence of three characters at that point in the story with Neelay and Mimi both attending the conference. It made that whole plot point sort of confusing because both seem to anticipate that Patricia is about to commit suicide.

I think the book alternates between being clear and easy to follow and then lapsing into ambiguity and it can make it hard to tell what is happening at times. I think the descriptive language just makes it even harder sometimes to follow along. I think it also covers a lot of themes that made it feel like the book itself was all over the place. I felt like we could have done without Neelay's storyline for sure at the very least even if I understand what Power's was trying to do with it.

I did really enjoy the writing and the structure of the story. I thought it was really cool how things unfolded and came together. It felt very in line with the idea of branching that was brought up again and again through out the book. Sometimes the book felt really obvious though and I feel like it could have been stronger if it alluded to things sometimes instead of spelling it out every time. I think it might also be a little hard to read passage upon passage describing trees endlessly.

Overall I enjoyed the book, especially the writing and the novelty of the structure and storyline. I liked the way there was repetition on certain themes and we saw a reoccurrence of sentences/passages through out. I did think it could've been stronger if it was edited down to take out Neelay's part of the story though because that felt like the weakest part of the storyline to me personally.