The Overstory
Nine Americans whose lives intertwine with trees. Powers's pro-nature epic is the rare "idea novel" that also breaks your heart, giving literary form to ecological grief and changing how many readers think about the non-human world. The novel that taught American fiction to be serious about climate.
After that opening the middle sags once the strands converge on activism. Readers say it runs well past what it needs, several calling it “300 pages too long,” with a twenty-two-hour audiobook cited as evidence. Nine viewpoints is more than most can track without notes. The message turns heavy-handed, readers complaining they got “hit over the head with this time and time again” rather than trusted to absorb the point. And characters who were vivid in their origin stories flatten into mouthpieces once the plot organises around the cause, becoming, as one reader puts it, “more symbolic than human.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
