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The Forgetting Tree (2012)

by Tatjana Soli(Favorite Author)

3.09 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1250001048 (ISBN13: 9781250001047)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

St. Martin's Press

review 1: This book was really just OK for me, and I wanted to like it more. It started out with great promise--a prologue told by the farm manager, and then Claire's story began. But to me, once she was diagnosed with cancer and the caretaker came in, the book went off the rails. It was many things, and I don't think they were many things done well--it tried to tie in Wide Sargasso Sea, which even if you've read it, like I have, the comparisons are often stretched. The scenes that take place in the Caribbean toward the end slow the momentum that the book has been building toward and I just wanted to skip those sections. Claire is a well-developed character, but there were questions left unanswered--why did she and her husband divorce? Why aren't we seeing more with the girls? I wou... moreld've liked more emphasis on the family unit itself. In the end, I thought that The Deep End of the Ocean deals with a similar situation in a much more engaging way. And then the book ends a la Rebecca, and you look at the book going, "Is that it?"
review 2: Mixed feelings about this book, based mainly on the difficult plot device of not letting Minna's history unfold more honestly and gradually but rather making the reader wait and then pushing it all out at us at one time. Once we begin to doubt Minna, once we see she is unreliable and begin to wonder about Claire's possible delusions and mental competence, I would have wished Minna's story to be a little more straightforward and connected to the primary storyline. On the other hand, lovely, moving, lyrical prose and as potent a depiction of loss and the uneasy peace that grieving humans find in being rooted to a place, as I have read in a long time. less

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