The Overstory
Two weeks have passed since I finished reading The Overstory. Day in and day out, pieces of the story drifted into my mind, as if the trees were calling out to me once more. I couldn’t mark the book as “read” on Goodreads because this was a book that I wanted to go on reading, a story that should have never ended.
No words could truly capture the significance of this novel. The magnificence of the tale could only be captured by a forest rolling ten thousand miles along the land.
If you had caught your breath walking through Redwoods, if you’ve stopped in your path to appreciate a single, wild flower, if you’ve once looked upon the sprout between concrete with fondness and admiration, this book would speak to your soul and make it reverberate.
And if you haven’t experienced any of the above, well, be prepared to welcome the kind of story that would take root in your heart and grow its own wild path.
“Masterpiece” was one of the first words that came to mind writing this book review, but the word would not capture the breadth and depth of The Overstory. I’ve never read anything like it—simulataneously filled with despair and hope, like a trunk struck down by lightning and a seedling ready to grow. This was an intimate, poignant love story to humans and the natural world alike, an amber alert punctuating your phone about what the masses failed to see—a missing humanity, a missing love for nature. A call for help, a tear running down a loved one’s delicate face, from both a million years ago and now.
From the beginning, we are but branches from the same soul. In the story, I have seen how we’ve taken so much and given so little. This novel should be humanity’s required reading for the survival of our species. It was love, time, and life wrapped in poetry for the natural world. It took root and blossomed as the reading concluded, only to start the cycle once again.
And now, I release the maple samaras of hope, dispersing them along, asking everyone and anyone to plant it with me, for a future we will never see. This was a simple book with a simple truth at its essence: you cannot plant a tree without believing in the future, and you cannot read this book without having faith that what we do today still matters.