Reviews

The Trees by Percival Everett

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angelica_jardinerica's review against another edition

5.0

In just a few lines Percival Everett has the ability to draw characters so vividly they practically leap off the page. I could picture them and hear their voices so clearly that I was hooked right from page one. He deftly juxtaposes gruesome killings with hilarious dialogues within the context of what appear to be the long dead victims of racial murder returning to reap fitting revenge on the perpetrators of these unpunished crimes. With short chapters, the narrative hurtles along at an unrelenting pace as the plot thickens and more and more secondary characters join the party. I loved the film American Fiction, based on another of Everett's novels, Erasure, so I'll definitely be reading more of his work.

broro117's review against another edition

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2.5

The Best Friend Reading Challenge: A book by an author of a different race

Huh. This one fell flat for me, but it also definitely won't be my last Percival Everett.

To start, my main gripe is that the white supremacists in this book are portrayed grotesque and overly cartoonish. Take this line, for instance, that made me physically wince while listening to it:

“That Hannity is cute,” Fancel said. “If I could get my hand anywhere near my vajayjay, I’d rub me one out just watchin’ him.”

I get that this is supposed to be funny, but I didn't find this brand of Everett's humor funny at all. In fact, I found this to be the novel's biggest issue. I think this type of condescension, painting white American conservatives as drooling buffoons, seriously undermines what Everett is going for. I understand the desire to mock people who've perpetuated hundreds of years of racial violence, but leaning too far into that is to the story's detriment.

These characters are so one-dimensional they don't seem real, and the people involved in these atrocities were/are very real. The insidiousness of these bigots and extremists lies in the fact that they seem like everyone else, not like obviously inept morons. This type of othering doesn't help anyone, and honestly, I think it's dangerous and pretty irresponsible. I guess I want more subtlety in my satire.

On some nit-pickier notes, the details of the murder scenes quickly grew very repetitive. The book itself needed a better editor. Some details were repeated after a few pages like they'd never been mentioned the first time, such as

Mama Z's father being hanged

.

There were also some easy fact-checking errors, like two-way police radios being used in 1913. The lynchings mentioned in the book (I looked up every single one) were only meant to be from 1913 on, but many of them were from long before that. And in one particularly embarrassing blunder, the names of lynching victims were wrong: Brothers Major and Andrew Clark and sisters Maggie and Alma Howze were lynched together in 1918, but the book referred to the victims as "Andrew Clark, Alma Major, and Maggie House."

And on one final kind-of-petty note, I found the audiobook narrator's line reading to be really poor and often confusing in a way that also hurt my experience with the book.

*Listened to audiobook