I've got to give this book some serious kudos for sticking with an interesting premise and not trying to cheat its way out of the limitations it had set on itself (at least for as long as I read in this book). I half expected this story to immediately find a loophole around the main character being a tree that allows him to go off and have adventures. In the nearly 60% of this book that I read, that didn't happen.
This focus on delivering something so different from the norm kept me reading as long as I did. I have a thing these days for books that try to deliver something new, and that intrigue kept me with this book long past where I might have put other books with the same problems down.
What are those problems? Well, there's only one that really mattered to me; the lack of compelling character work.
This story focuses so closely on the premise of the protagonist being a tree and building out the world that the tree exists in that it forgets to put in the necessary work to develop characters to care about. The protagonist is the perfect example of this. He is a man who died in our world and was reincarnated as a tree. There's a lot of in-built character conflict to work with there, the first and foremost being how someone would react to suddenly being a tree. The protagonist was once a walking, talking human with vast freedom of movement and agency over his own existence. Now he is rooted in a single location and unable to move, see, smell, touch, or hear. He develops many of those things over time, but there are vast periods of this novel where we should have been in the trenches with this character as he battles his way through adjusting to this kind of existence.
Instead, the story is told at a distance, skipping over vast periods of time and letting that character work happen in the background. When the passage of time finally slows, and the tree takes more of a role in the events of the world around him, we have skipped over all this opportunity to develop a main character and focus solely on moving the plot forward. The trouble is that I have been kept at such a distance for so long that I don't care.
Throughout the opening chapters of the novel, we are introduced to new characters only to have them killed off before they mean anything to us. After enough repetition of this, I stopped caring about the side characters. So when there were finally side characters who stuck around long enough to care about them, I was still removed from them because I assumed they wouldn't matter in the long run anyway.
The whole novel is told at a distance, like it is informing you of something interesting that happened but not letting you experience it for yourself. Sadly, it meant that no matter how much I liked the premise of this book, I couldn't get into it, and I had to call it a day at about the 60% mark.
I'd love to see another draft of this book that goes a little more in-depth into this fascinating premise and focuses a bit more on developing the protagonist, at the least. You could keep the rest of the story exactly how it is, but by investing us in the protagonist and his struggles as a tree, we would get me way more invested in this story as a whole, and it would elevate every single aspect of this novel. Think how much more meaningful it would be if we felt the depths of loneliness in this character and then see him lose the rare companions he finds time after time while he is left behind without them. It would provide a more meaningful experience to both the main narrative and the side characters, elevating the story as a whole.
For that reason, it's 3-stars for this one. I really wanted to love this, but I think it was taken out of the oven a little too soon.