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2025 Booker Prize Shortlist Discussion
By Hugh , Active moderator · 101 posts · 264 views
By Hugh , Active moderator · 101 posts · 264 views
last updated 5 hours, 48 min ago
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2025 Booker Shortlist Dynamic Rankings
By Hugh , Active moderator · 38 posts · 195 views
By Hugh , Active moderator · 38 posts · 195 views
last updated Oct 31, 2025 02:52PM
What Members Thought
Whoever you are, you need to set aside your thin skin for this one. The caustic satirical humor, poked at everyone but especially those of us from the south, is what makes bearable the grizzly painful slow-motion genocide that gives rise (pun intended - you'll get it after you read the book) to the arc of the story. On the serious side though, it is those trees, bearing their strange fruit born of noose or bullet but always of hatred, that make this story necessary. If that all sounds cryptic, i
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This book started out as a five star read for me. The first quarter was extremely funny - - just the blackest of black humor, and I was appreciating it.
Set in Mississippi, the story follows a series of murders where a white man (or men) is found dead alongside a similarly deceased black man. The black man is holding the balls of the white man in his hands in each case. Initially, this scenario is pretty provocative and suspenseful. We get scenes of the bumbling police force trying to deal with ...more
Set in Mississippi, the story follows a series of murders where a white man (or men) is found dead alongside a similarly deceased black man. The black man is holding the balls of the white man in his hands in each case. Initially, this scenario is pretty provocative and suspenseful. We get scenes of the bumbling police force trying to deal with ...more
To write a witty and page-turning novel about such a somber subject as Mississippi's past, racism, KKK and lynching, needs a skilled hand. Everett provides it here with aplomb.
Not all victims of lynching were hanged. In 1955 Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy from Chicago visiting the town of Money in Mississippi, allegedly whistled at a white woman. As punishment, the woman's husband and his half-brother tortured Till to death.
The two separate killings that kick off "The Trees" take place i ...more
Not all victims of lynching were hanged. In 1955 Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy from Chicago visiting the town of Money in Mississippi, allegedly whistled at a white woman. As punishment, the woman's husband and his half-brother tortured Till to death.
The two separate killings that kick off "The Trees" take place i ...more
Nov 22, 2021
Beverly
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
literary,
library-book,
united-states,
mystery,
historical-fiction,
mississippi,
horror,
satire,
race,
2021
One of my top reads for 2021!
thoughts coming shortly
thoughts coming shortly
percival everett's twenty-second novel, the trees is a brutal, often hilarious satire and reckoning with america's racist past and present. as the bodies of viciously murdered white bigots begin to appear around mississippi (and eventually elsewhere), a pair of witty detectives investigate the cases and begin to find something much stranger going on. everett's lively characters, his riotous use of vernacular, and his well-plotted, cinematic confrontation with lynching and centuries' worth of rac
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The Trees
I am currently reading some of the 2022 Booker Longlist, and as of this week’s announcement, the shortlist with a friend. This is the third book on the shortlist I’ve read. Despite its length of over 300 pages, it is a quick read.
Set in Money, Mississippi, some readers may recognize this tiny town as the place of the infamous murder in 1955 of Chicago teenager Emmett Till. I didn’t recognize but the connection is made by the writer soon enough. Money once had 400 residents and a cotton ...more
I am currently reading some of the 2022 Booker Longlist, and as of this week’s announcement, the shortlist with a friend. This is the third book on the shortlist I’ve read. Despite its length of over 300 pages, it is a quick read.
Set in Money, Mississippi, some readers may recognize this tiny town as the place of the infamous murder in 1955 of Chicago teenager Emmett Till. I didn’t recognize but the connection is made by the writer soon enough. Money once had 400 residents and a cotton ...more
Holy shit.
This is the second Percival Everett book I've read (the other being So Much Blue) and it might be the last because...meh. It started off promising enough but lost some sparkle as it went on. Maybe I wasn't in the mood for satire, which is what I think this book is more than any of the genres it's tagged as, like horror, mystery, thriller, etc--it wasn't any of those; you could make a case for literary fiction, but to me it didn't really seem deep enough for that label. More than anything, it was
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And with that, I have completed the 18-title ToB shortlist!
The Trees is set in Money, Mississippi. Carolyn Bryant—the woman who accused Emmett Till—is an elderly woman in this novel, surrounded by descendants. But this novel is not about her. This novel is about race relations and karma. It’s about years, decades, centuries of pain. It touches on what “race” really even is/isn’t.
The main characters are Ed and Jim, Black detectives of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. They are sent to Mon ...more
The Trees is set in Money, Mississippi. Carolyn Bryant—the woman who accused Emmett Till—is an elderly woman in this novel, surrounded by descendants. But this novel is not about her. This novel is about race relations and karma. It’s about years, decades, centuries of pain. It touches on what “race” really even is/isn’t.
The main characters are Ed and Jim, Black detectives of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. They are sent to Mon ...more
Ah Percival Everett, you never fail to surprise me with each new novel. Your writing is perpetually interesting and each plot an original. This satirical novel had me laughing out loud at the same time it had me cringing with anger. How does he do it? Two Mississippi Bureau agents, Ed and Jim who happen to be black, are sent to Money, MI to investigate a gruesome murder. Money is the kind of town that is "chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods stuck in the pre-war nineteenth century and living p
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I was put off by the author's very poor grasp of the dialects of the characters. White people in Mississippi do not say things like "We is...' (I can say from experience). And in general, I was not liking the way in which some characters are essentially comic stereotypes, while others are more like real people.
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Jul 26, 2022
Stewart
marked it as to-read
Jul 28, 2022
Andrew
marked it as to-read
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
gan-the-great-american-novel
Sep 04, 2022
Christian Powers
rated it
really liked it
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review of another edition
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audiobooks
