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ainwena's review
It bounced around too much between perspectives and did not build the world well enough for me to want to continue after multiple POVs.
murderbotscholar's review
This is something I might recommend to certain readers but personally, I was bored.
stefhyena's review
hopeful
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
To be fair, I think this must be the hardest genre to write it and I always (or almost always) end up disappointed. I go into these books hoping for bold thought experiments and what they always seem to have is the sort of white, middle-class comfort that increasingly doesn't work as comfort (most people will suffer and die off screen but some of us will survive and there is so much MEANING in that).
This one did some good work in the early chapters, especially how showing that what Jude and Bernard and to some extent Sophie (though she was an unsatisfactorily left vague character) did in the early days was meaningful. I kind of forgive books like this for having these sacrificial characters that go nowhere much. But it shows that saving books was a meaningful act and that being bold to garden differently (rewild) also helped later generations as did growing food and medicinal herbs.
But then the book absolutely lost the plot with the violin. WTF was that? I love music but it was a very Eurocentric idea that the violin is somehow superior to other possibilities for the arts (and then later on the cathedral quite rightly was joined to that). Just WTF? And the greed and squandering that went into it in the book is glorified as the ultimate act of beauty and hope, what it means to be a human (but actually it's what's put us in this mess to begin with). So humans being grandiose and wasteful is posited as essential to what humanity is.
And then there are unrealistic technofetishistic things happening with a benevolent government that somehow manages to be stable (in some way that is not explained) and delivers food drops to remote communities. Yeah right! They don't even do that now that resources are relatively available! The economic and political side of things just all happens by magic and there is no war or fighting, everyone just stays middle-class (in fact anyone without middle-class white values seems to have died off). We have a respectable heteronormative society with pretty much stock-standard 50s gender roles (but inclusivity is shown by having some gay respectable relationships happen briefly in the wings of the real story) and the main protagonists who actually do stuff are men but Sophie is revered as an elder without doing much apart from gardening and there are daughters and love-interests and one violinist-turned-mother who are female.
I don't understand how women authors in the 2020s are still centring men to this extent and writing women so blandly and 2D. I would have forgiven that though if there was something here apart from nice middle-class comfort that gardening and music will somehow magically save us all while we ignore politics and economy (if only).
Also I felt uneasy at the place of nature in this book as still always just a vehicle and a tool (growing trees into benches and scarred cathedrals). There is no change to humanity here at all and therefore for me little hope. I still liked it better than Overstory.
This one did some good work in the early chapters, especially how showing that what Jude and Bernard and to some extent Sophie (though she was an unsatisfactorily left vague character) did in the early days was meaningful. I kind of forgive books like this for having these sacrificial characters that go nowhere much. But it shows that saving books was a meaningful act and that being bold to garden differently (rewild) also helped later generations as did growing food and medicinal herbs.
But then the book absolutely lost the plot with the violin. WTF was that? I love music but it was a very Eurocentric idea that the violin is somehow superior to other possibilities for the arts (and then later on the cathedral quite rightly was joined to that). Just WTF? And the greed and squandering that went into it in the book is glorified as the ultimate act of beauty and hope, what it means to be a human (but actually it's what's put us in this mess to begin with). So humans being grandiose and wasteful is posited as essential to what humanity is.
And then there are unrealistic technofetishistic things happening with a benevolent government that somehow manages to be stable (in some way that is not explained) and delivers food drops to remote communities. Yeah right! They don't even do that now that resources are relatively available! The economic and political side of things just all happens by magic and there is no war or fighting, everyone just stays middle-class (in fact anyone without middle-class white values seems to have died off). We have a respectable heteronormative society with pretty much stock-standard 50s gender roles (but inclusivity is shown by having some gay respectable relationships happen briefly in the wings of the real story) and the main protagonists who actually do stuff are men but Sophie is revered as an elder without doing much apart from gardening and there are daughters and love-interests and one violinist-turned-mother who are female.
I don't understand how women authors in the 2020s are still centring men to this extent and writing women so blandly and 2D. I would have forgiven that though if there was something here apart from nice middle-class comfort that gardening and music will somehow magically save us all while we ignore politics and economy (if only).
Also I felt uneasy at the place of nature in this book as still always just a vehicle and a tool (growing trees into benches and scarred cathedrals). There is no change to humanity here at all and therefore for me little hope. I still liked it better than Overstory.
nicovivi's review against another edition
Either I am not in the mood to read this extreme vignettes, or I am not getting the overarching theme. The very first "story" definitely intrigued me, and was excited to continue, but the subsequent stories were really hard for me to get, and was very confused about the world building. I might try this another time, I just don't want to slog through just to finish a book, right now.
jessa_sage1996's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
The world has reached a point of no return because of climate change and are suffering the results of an environmental apocalypse. Each story is an interconnected short story of people existing on this ravaged planet.
I liked this book. It's super short and should have only taken a few hours to read. It reminded me of “How High We Go in the Dark” but shorter. Much shorter. This book plops a reader right in the middle of an already ravaged and being ravaged planet. You can assume what happened to the world and it spells out certain aspects such as numerous epidemics and massive wildfires, global temperature increases and flooding and mudslides and topsoil erosion - I mean, I suppose the book pretty much does spell out what happened to the planet but the book does begin when everything has already fallen apart. It seemed very speculative fiction to me which, as the genre does, causes me to get lost in my head. It was interesting.
bookslikegranola's review against another edition
2.0
A near future sci-fi that I really didn’t enjoy. A fair warning, I am generally picky with both my short stories and my near-future sci-fi and many other people seemed to have really liked this.
Arboreality is a chronological series of short stories set in the pacific northwest as climate change causes drastic changes and severely impoverishes the inhabitants of the region. However, the world building felt paper thin, only fleshed out in small snippets when the author wanted to glut the reader on misery. For example, the library of University of Victoria is so under funded that professors start stealing books so they don’t perish, but there is money for cutting edge genome engineering and mars missions. Or how the government can sometimes send rations to Vancouver island, and satellites don’t exist anymore, but everything’s great in Cincinnati (because nebulous billionaires), and also, here’s a random cut away to a girl on a beach watching a pod of dolphins die. I really didn’t enjoy this on a short story level, I didn’t find it entertaining, and I found it really lacking as a thought piece/exploration of climate change. It held strains of “government oversight will recede and finally communities of people that really care about each other can return to the land”, which is a story, but not one about reducing carbon in the atmosphere! I don’t really get what this has to say other than a popular feeling that climate change will come and punish us and only through small human connections can we rebuild. That is not how its going to go (or if that is, it will be after such a monumental loss of human life that cannot be ignored in a narrative like this)! I guess the strongest theme is about how certain people, especially the poor, will be left behind during large scale strife, but I would have liked am much stronger exploration if that is meant to be the sum total of the work. Obviously, I have a strong reaction to this because I really hate a vibes based reaction to climate change over the many interesting and challenging topics that exist, but your mileage may vary. Sorry if you really liked this.
I don’t recommend this book and I don’t think it has much to add to a discussion about climate change.
kleonard's review against another edition
4.0
Arboreality will probably become a must-read book in the genre of cli-fi. A series of stories interlinked by place and people and plants, it's an imagining of a world vastly altered by rising seas, rising temperatures, and changing species. It probably deserves that role, as a must-read, but it's also very sentimental, at times maudlin. It's not always easy to identify with the characters, some of who are intensely self-pitying and others who don't feel particularly real. The central story, about a man crafting a violin, focuses on the kinds of behaviors the future might bring: he poaches wood from protected forests, fells a rare sitka spruce, and buys black-market wood from Africa in order to make his ultimate instrument. He justifies all of it: making art requires sacrifice. But ultimately, the stories suggest that it wasn't worth it, that while some small communities might survive and even thrive in some ways, the end is nigh, for individuals and for everything but the plants and animals that will outlive humankind.