The Island of Missing Trees in AMS Book Club at UBC

Feb 16, 2023 Soph rated it really liked it · review of another edition

the ending??? hello??? very good book with nice writing. I was so lost at the start though and cared more about the owners of The Happy Fig than the main love interests.

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Feb 22, 2023 Anna (ani) 🕷 rated it liked it · review of another edition

3.5 stars -

okay, where do I start with this one?

If you’ve seen my few Goodreads updates then my rating is probably surprising because boy was I dissing on this at the start. I’ll admit to it. I was ready to DNF after like 40 pages. Can I explain why? Yes, for three reasons: First, I hated the prose for some reason. I guess the writing itself is fine, and there are a few passages I really like even at the beginning, but there’s just this pretentious almost “wise” vibe to it that I just was not ap 3.5 stars -

okay, where do I start with this one?

If you’ve seen my few Goodreads updates then my rating is probably surprising because boy was I dissing on this at the start. I’ll admit to it. I was ready to DNF after like 40 pages. Can I explain why? Yes, for three reasons: First, I hated the prose for some reason. I guess the writing itself is fine, and there are a few passages I really like even at the beginning, but there’s just this pretentious almost “wise” vibe to it that I just was not appreciating. It was ESPECIALLY bad in the tree parts. And oh boy, the tree chapters… that was the second thing I could not get behind. The beginning, with the tree musing about how in love she is with Kostas and how she’s “not pretty like other trees”? NO. I could not. I had to close the book for a bit. Maybe it was supposed to be humorous or silly but I was dying besties. Truly. The third reason I was NOT enjoying it was Ada. Like seriously, I know teenagers can be a rude and moody and enigmatic, and she has all the right reasons to be, but it was just a little bit of an overbearing start to a book that I thought was going to be about civil war, immigration, and generational trauma (which ends up being true, but I did not know that). When she screamed in class I was honestly so confused, I feel like we as readers did not see enough of a reason for this. Although this event IS explained away as something unexpected, something which Ada herself doesn’t fully understand, it felt so random and clunky at the beginning of the story I couldn’t help but feel like it would have been more impactful if she had just cried loudly in class. The shame and embarrassment she feels afterwards really makes me feel as though this inciting incident was out of character, but because it’s like the first thing we see of her I was just left feeling confused??? I don’t know how else to describe it. Poor Ada but what the heck. Anyways but that’s not even why I dislike her, she’s just annoying.

Thankfully, it got better. I actually got really hooked on the story once we moved past the dreadful exposition. In particular, I found the parts (everything) in Cyprus to be much more impactful - the summer of 1974, the forbidden love between Defne and Kostas and their mostly secret meetings, and just everything that Yusuf and Yiorgos did… I seriously cried on the airplane bro. I even got used to the writing and fig tree chapters, although the communication with every single animal on the island was getting kind of old by the end (to clarify I did not HATE this aspect in particular, I thought it was cool all the flora and fauna were in communication with one another). I love the way humans and trees are both kind of interconnected throughout the story too, with the idea that they both bear the memories and traumas of their predecessors, but they survive. I liked the way everything kind of ties together in the end, and how all the truths hinted at throughout the story get revealed. Still, reading it, the story always felt a bit clunky jumping back and forth with the past/present/tree/human chapters, but it definitely worked to both build suspense and reveal information sometimes so I’m not really complaining.

Also, on a closing note, that little thing at the ending… Definitely redeemed some of the questionable aspects of the story to me (but not everything). Anyways. The takeaway is that it was rough to start off with but I enjoyed it eventually. ...more

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Feb 14, 2023 Carly rated it really liked it

Probably give it a 3.7 so I just rounded it to 4 stars. It was a great exploration of generational trauma. The book used a lot of metaphors that either fell flat or were too obvious and it hindered my reading experience. I also wasn't a big fan of the fig tree chapters but I understood their purpose by the end. ...more

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Apr 08, 2023 Tshepiso rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-fiction

3.5 stars

It's hard to unpack my feelings about The Island of Missing Trees. This is Literary Fiction with a capital L which generally isn't for me. Because of that, I don't have much to say about the story. It was well written. I appreciated getting to learn more about the history of Cypress. Its themes of intergenerational trauma were well executed. But there's not much more to say about it, unfortunately.

I did enjoy the conversation I had about it with my book club (and especially hearing from ...more

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