The Overstory by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really like the idea at the foundation of this story — the Overstory. Even though I don’t think I saw Overstory mentioned once in the telling. Several times the understory was mentioned, making me take a guess as to the overstory. This is really a powerful story, coming at the reader from multiple directions and people’s lives, all connected in some form or another. But that is the point. On one level this is a retelling of Edward Abbey’s the Monkey Wrench Gang. On another level, I thought about the seeds of life that are possibly traveling throughout the Cosmos looking for a hospitable environment where life takes hold and evolves toward the next level. At the end of the reading, I realized the characters in the telling were not just the humans leading their marks throughout a cause, but there is just one character to consider and it is going to be “just fine”.