Her father takes her and her sisters on trips to national parks in America, which helps them bond as a family.

Mimi Ma is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant. The insurance money allows him to stay on the farm and create art pieces about the chestnut tree planted by his ancestors. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019.Ī young man returns to his home for Christmas, only to find that his family had died in a gas leak. It tells the story of several environmentalists and their struggles to make people hear their message about saving the environment. The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers. I’m happy I read this, but truthfully I probably won’t read any Richard Powers again.1-Page Summary of The Overstory Overall Summary I wanted to spend more time in the activism part of the story, which instead fell short (literally) in comparison to the rest. Overall, The Overstory, is a massive, detailed, and flashy experiment on trees. Much like the long stories in the beginning, a drawn out ending followed the interlocking narratives in the middle. I think Powers killed off characters for the sake of not knowing what else to do. The question of why plant lives are less important than human lives is one of the most interesting themes here, but there’s so much else going on that I think it gets a little lost. I’ve never thought much about terrorism as activism, which is one of the environmental avenues explored in this book.

One Goodreads reviewer called this “tree porn.” Tree porn this certainly is, and I’m blown away by the understanding and research Powers displays on biology and earth science, tree species, and the complexities of environmental activism. I try not to read a lot of reviews before writing my own, but I did peek at some for The Overstory. The way that Powers writes about trees is beautiful. One of the most impressive parts of this book is that all the characters and their stories do become.

I like this part of the book best, because I generally enjoy character studies and not a lot of plot. The beginning- which reads like short stories- is a study and introduction of each character. There’s a lot going on in a forest, and Powers attempts to comment on all of it. It could have been cut by a good 200 pages or so. Perhaps like the growth of trees, this is a dense, slow book that’s overwritten at points. There’s one thing all the characters have in common: their love of trees. I found myself wondering how in the world these characters and their stories would connect, which is what motivated me to keep reading. The Overstory follows the lives of several characters who eventually come together.

The over story