#BookReview: The Overstory

Richard Powers won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Overstory, which the Pulitzer Board described as “an ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them.”

I was determined to love The Overstory. So determined that I wrestled with it for many months, repeatedly picking it up and chucking it down with a sigh of defeat.

While undeniably brilliant, I finally conceded that this just is not my type of story.

Reading the reviews online I found a similar pattern. Readers either loved it wildly or couldn’t stomach it.

It did not leave me unmoved, however.

Powers’ sweeping novel left me in awe of trees and the natural world.

They are the true wonders.

“There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe” – from the publisher.

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