The Overstory

RON CHARLES, THE WASHINGTON POST

"This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction ... What makes The Overstory so fascinating is the way it talks to itself, responding to its own claims about the fate of the Earth with confirmation and contradiction. Individual stories constantly shift the novel's setting and pace, changing registers, pushing into every cranny of these people's lives ... In harrowing scenes of personal sacrifice — or deadly self-righteousness — we see an unlikely group drawn together by their absolute conviction that our rapacious destruction of trees is an act of mass suicide. The urgency of that belief gives rise to the novel's most unsettling theme: the tension between complacency and stridency in the face of existential threats."

MICHAEL UPCHURCH, THE BOSTON GLOBE

"By turns visionary, exhortatory, and doom-stricken, The Overstory is a big, ambitious epic, spanning the last half of the 20th century and asking what we're doing to our planet. It's too heady, too rhapsodic, too strange to be characterized as agitprop fiction. But it does have a sobering message ... Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the book — the arcs his characters follow over the decades from crusading passion to muddled regret and a sense of failure — are thoroughly compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers's prose, which persuades you on the very first page that you're hearing the voices of trees as they chide our species."