Saturday, October 6, 2018

Harry’s Trees, by Jon Cohen. Mira, 2018





Harry has always loved trees and found them a comforting presence, so he went to work with the Forest Service. Then he found himself stuck behind a desk for years, putting information into a computer and never seeing the outdoors. When his beloved wife dies in a horrible accident, it upends his entire world. He leaves his home and job, and finds himself in the Endless Mountains in Pennsylvania. This is where he runs into Amanda and Oriana.



Amanda is a young widow, a nurse scrambling to make ends meet and deal with her daughter’s grief and insistence that her father will return from the dead. In the Endless Mountains forest, her father had built her an amazing tree house, weather tight and good sized, the kind of tree house that we all dreamed about as kids. Amanda decides to allow Harry to stay in the tree house for a while, as he sorts himself out, and helps Oriana sort herself out. They end up on an amazing adventure with a mysterious fairy tale book, an invincible librarian, sacks of gold, and multiple enemies to defeat.



It’s a brilliant story, a fairy tale on a modern scale, where the trees are as important as the people, where a little girl with a red coat is the bravest, and where the Wolf talks to the dog. The writing made me feel like the world was illuminated with golden light despite the people who were greedy. I was so sad when the book ended; not because it ends sadly but because I had to walk away from that world. Five stars. 


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I got this book free from the Amazon Vine Program in return for an unbiased review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.

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