After being shaken up, spun around, their lives totally turned upside down through unexpected and devastating loss, three characters—Harry, Oriana, and Amanda—are all serendipitously tossed together in a Pennsylvania wooded copse where the stability of the forest and the soulful nature of trees helps heal these three through their shared grief. While this is a book that starts heavy and is filled with the weighted sorrow of a widower’s first widowed year, it is equally mixed with the humor and the enchantment of life’s little bits of magic: life-giving forests and children’s imaginations. And it’s through this balance of introspective traveling paired perfectly with fairytale adventures that makes Harry’s Trees (or Oriana’s Forest) such a worthwhile read. ( )

Harry's Trees is a story about grief and recovery that somehow manages to be fanciful and resist sentimentality. Oriana, a voracious fairy tale reader who spends much of her time either in a treehouse or with her best friend Olive the librarian, is enchanting. Olive has the kind of sage, raw power that makes me fall in love with the library field all over again. The prose is beautiful, the symbolism is heavy, and all I want to do is make my way over to Wilderness Tract A803. ( )

Harry was a government forest worker. He had long wanted to quit his pencil-pushing job and begin his own nursery. While his wife encouraged his dream, Harry wanted to have a large nest egg before beginning: the type of nest egg that could only come from winning the lottery.

And he did win the lottery – unfortunately as his beloved wife stood outside the store while he was buying the ticket, she was killed in a freak accident.

Heartbroken, Harry headed to the forest to kill himself. He was saved by a precocious young girl, also grieving her father’s death.

There’s a town library with a heroic elderly librarian struggling to keep it open. There’s a mysterious hand-written book about a grum, a troll-like creature sitting on a pile of gold. There is an evil, entitled brother, and of course the little girl’s lovely grieving mother.

Harry and the girl devise a plan to take the curse off the money (which Harry no longer wants).

It’s saccharine and mostly predictable and until about three quarters of the way through I wondered if I would finish it. But then the characters took hold, a bit of magic happened and I was interested, although never quite charmed by this modern fairy tale.

Lots of promise, not quite realized. ( )

Intersecting threads that make for a fun read. ( )

This one lagged early, but it grew on me. Through the first third or maybe even half, I was going to give it 3 stars, but there was just too much good about how it wrapped up. I loved the idea of the importance of story in our lives. ( )