I loved entering the world of trees through this multi-character narrative. I'm guessing the weave of the stories, their outstretched branches and roots, served as a metaphor in its own right to the complex lives of trees and forests. I took off one star because I wish it were 150 pages shorter, as I felt like I had to slog through a hefty portion. But finishing it felt pretty incredible. It was heartbreaking. Finally, I wanted to read the fictional character Patricia Westerford's book "The Secret Forest" which sounded spectacular. Fortunately there is the real book "The Hidden Life of Trees" to look forward to.
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Just too slow for me. Listened to it on Audible and one of the few times I had to speed it up to 1.5 or I would lose interest altogether. ( )

Floats around and touches on many subjects including eco-terrorism, the language of trees and is riddled with motifs like green. The book takes on some big questions around the morality of capitalism. ( )

So many people recommended this book to me but I just didn't love it. It took me a long time to get through the first 1/3 of it. Interesting story lines and fun to see how they connected, but I'm sorry to say this one just didn't hold my interest. Too sprawling? I finished it, but it was a tough read for me. ( )

If you want your next book to be a challenge, look no further. This is a book of big ideas, too many to list. It is unusually dark and very heavy on the reader. The central theme is environmentalism, but it is a lot more than that.

While reading this my brain made a weird connection to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. Not only because of the tree as the prevalent motif, but there is just something grandiose about these two works of art, something that will partly always remain unreachable to the audience, but you can sense that it is there. It is art pushed to the extreme, profound, but also insufferable at times. A lot is left to the interpretation of the reader.

Overstory touches on all the topics I love to read about, but it was still a hard work. It feels much longer than it actually is (around 500 pages). After the first part (Roots) that is a collection of stories through which we get to know the ten (!) main characters, things get a little complicated.
In the remaining parts of the book there are many superfluous descriptions, redundant characters and general lack of direction. Moreover, some ideas were really pushed too hard onto the reader through a black and white lens.

However, some paragraphs were so profoundly beautiful that it almost seems worth it. I kept rereading some sentences and have highlighted more paragraphs than in all the books I've read this year so far.

If the book had been edited and cleaned up a little more, I would have enjoyed it much more. It is a book you want to root for, you want everyone to read it. But, it is very inaccessible and I would be reluctant to recommend it to more casual readers. ( )