A cult that isn’t a cult springs up. Groups of people standing still, trying to become trees.
Bren and his partner Caelyn encounter a group early on, an eerie group of strangers who believe they can become part of nature when they’re ready. Bren and Caelyn walk away, wondering.
They’re at an awkward stage in their lives, in a near-future world that is just a little different from our own. Jobs are hard to get or transforming into something meaningless. So how do you build a meaningful future? Caelyn is intrigued by the tree people, eager to get closer to them even as others warn her off. Bren finds them disturbing but doesn’t want to stop Caelyn from following her heart. But what happens when they start taking root?
I think this will be marketed as an accessible literary SF book that’s mostly about people turning into trees. But there are some other thoughtful and interesting SF ideas in there too – the struggle for young people to find jobs as AI does more and more. Being unsure if what you’re doing has a purpose, whether you’re even talking to humans when you do have a job. If everyone becomes apathetic, how do we react when the world starts to change forever (slowly, according to this book)? How do we want to die (or not die) when the time is right?
It’s written in a fragmented, literary style that may be marmite for some but really worked for me with these characters. They tell a very human story in a world that’s on the edge of something new. One that has stayed with me.
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