I found a pairing by accident that I think actually helps this book: read it alongside something about mycorrhizal networks, the fungal web that lets trees share resources and warning signals underground, and Powers’s structural choices stop looking like a gimmick and start looking like the whole point. The novel opens with nine largely disconnected character studies, root systems if you want to run with the metaphor, before the canopy starts closing overhead and the stories begin touching each other. It’s a long setup. I know customers who’ve put this down at page eighty and never come back for it, and I understand the impulse, because that first quarter reads like nine short stories loosely filed under one cover.

Stay with it. The Hoel family chestnut chapter alone is worth the patience, a single tree tracked across five generations via a box of photographs taken the same day each month, and by the time Powers gets to Olivia’s near-death experience and the activists chaining themselves to old growth in the Pacific Northwest, the earlier chapters have quietly become load-bearing. This is a novel that wants you to feel time on a scale longer than a human life, and it does that formally, not just thematically, by making you sit through decades of setup before the urgency arrives.

Where it stumbles, and I think it does stumble a little, is in the second half’s activism plot, which occasionally tips from character study into polemic. Adam and Douglas Pavlicek’s arc through the direct-action movement is compelling as drama but sometimes reads like Powers is arguing a position rather than dramatizing one, and a couple of the late scenes hit their point harder than the material needed. It’s a minor complaint against a novel this ambitious, but it’s there.

What earns the five stars anyway is the prose at the sentence level, precise and patient in a way that mirrors its subject, and the sheer audacity of writing a nine-hundred-page ensemble novel that actually argues, and mostly proves, that trees deserve a scale of attention we’ve spent centuries refusing to give them. I’ve recommended it more than any other book on this shelf this year, with the caveat that I always give the same caveat: give it a hundred pages before you decide.