A multi-generational story about the Greenwood family and their relationship to trees. I really liked the structure of this story, which the author compares to both the rings of a tree, the roots of a tree, and to a carpentry design where a board is sliced and then placed in a bookleaf pattern so that it almost looks like two haves of a cross section of a tree, but is really a slightly distorted mirror image. We start in the near future in the midst of an environmental catastrophe where there may only be one stand of old growth Doug fir left in the world, then travel back to the character's carpenter father, ecoterrorist grandmother, logging baron great grandfather, before swinging back forward through all the layers to end back with the youngest generation. With each passage of time, we find out more about the context of the previous generation, and much of the story is about how we can't truly know our own story, that layers of the past will always be obscured or distorted. As we move forward, some characters come to learn more of their history, but never fully, never to the extent the reader now knows them. Additionally, in conversation with how roots work, and how each tree is in communication with the whole forest, the spread of influences on each character is far beyond biological family, until the heartwood is the chorused voice of an entire community.

It's a beautifully written book, with a depth of compassion and understanding that works on a human level, as well as a literary one (rather than some litfic's sweeping assertions about human nature where you think about them later and are like, "that's very pretty, but I have no idea what it means and/or I have never met a human being to whom it applies.") I'm often cautious about books written by men in that their treatment of women is often not great, but this one was written with immense empathy and understanding both of the female and the queer characters. It wasn't always very happy, and people didn't make good choices a lot of the time, but their motivations really resonated with me.

If I had one qualm, it would be that though this book is all the way to very white, as the first point of view character is mixed race, having a South Asian mother, it's pretty white. It doesn't invalidate it as a story, but it also feels like it's leaving such a huge part of Canadian life out, when it's trying for such a sweeping, universalist narrative. This is kind of highlighted by the treatment of First Nations, which are mentioned, then dismissed in a very lasting* way. The land is mentioned as stolen, and at most the Indigenous people are killed off in a passing reference, rather than having a voice in all this. Greenwood Island is variously mentioned as having been in the territories of the Haida and the Heiltsuk which are neither interchangeable nor near each other, and neither of which are a few hours by boat from Vancouver, especially not in the 1950s! Given that the book is about a profound sense of place and connection with nature, it felt like a pretty big gap to leave.

That aside (!), I really liked the book, and would like to read it again to see how all the pieces fit together. I think it's a story that will reward revisiting.

* "Firsting and Lasting" is a term coined by Jean M. O'Brien, to describe how historical narratives portray Indigenous people as vanishing, or even no longer existing at all, by writing history as a series of "first time a settler did this" and "last time an Indigenous person did that." O'Brien has a book about it of the same name, which I probably should read (given how many people I've seen cite it), but have not. However, there's a good summary of the concepts here.