This imaginative new novel by an Austin Texas author is a light fun read set in modern times and featuring the 12 year old Holly Foster. She spends a summer with her uncle in a small Vermont town where a unique grove of ancient fictional trees is under threat and unhealthy. The meaning of roots takes on a double meaning as she explores her own ancestry and the connectedness of trees via fungal rhizosomes. I won’t reveal more of the plot except to say that it is both complex and quite ingenious but not difficult to follow. In a way, it builds on the science behind Suzanne Simone’s Finding The Mother Tree, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and Meridith Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.
My only criticism of this book is that the protagonist seems much too emotionally mature to be only twelve and I think it would be more realistic if she were made 14 or 15.
9/10
The Passionate Reader 