The Biblio File
March 13, 2023
Librarian book review!
Shamefully, I will more often than not judge a book by its cover. I’m sorry to say that if I hadn’t been researching this years’ list for Canada Reads I likely would have overlooked Greenwood by Michael Christie. Lesson learned!
“They come for the trees. It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich-eco-tourists in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall and facing the possibility of his own death. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is just out of jail for one of her environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and rapacious timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant, only to find himself tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival.”
It was the mention of the beautiful trees in British Columbia that first drew me to this book. The author has done an amazing job of featuring them as the constant but underlying star of the show. He writes in a way that makes you want to slow down and appreciate the words. I very much enjoyed this intertwined family saga and felt a renewed appreciation for our forests – it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that they are quite literally at the root of our survival.
Need to do some printing? At the library we charge 25 cents per page for black & white pages and $1.00 per page for color pages.