The Trees by Ali Shaw; Grade: B+
I recently finished reading The Trees by Ali Shaw. It is an extraordinary book, as I had expected it would be, having already read the author’s previous novels (The Girl With Glass Feet and The Man Who Rained). He has a real gift for imagining bizarre situations and making them believable.
In The Trees, the bizarre situation is a tree apocalypse! Huge trees just suddenly burst out of the ground all over England (and presumably the entire world), destroying buildings, streets, the electrical grid and other utilities, and just about everything else modern people take for granted and need for survival. Strange animals lurk among the trees, including the mysterious Whisperers, creepy little creatures made of plant parts.
The first character we are introduced to is Adrian, a sad and fearful man, who survived the onslaught of the trees, but who probably would have died soon afterward if he hadn’t crossed paths with Hannah, who knew how to survive in the wild, and her son, Seb. Bonded by a mix of necessity and pity, they travel together across an eerie, threatening new landscape in search of distant loved ones, meeting with other survivors, as well as new perils, along the way.
As much as I admire Shaw’s easy writing style and bountiful imagination, I could not give the book an A grade, because the story includes animal abuse and mutilation. It was in some ways necessary to the story, so I don’t hold it against him too much, but I throw it out there as a warning to other readers, many of whom would find it even more disturbing than I did. In all other respects, I am glad to have read the book. I think the story is one that will stay with me. Shaw’s three novels have all been good, but I suspect that his best book is still in him, and I look forward to reading it, whatever it may turn out to be.