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A review by turquoisespiff
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
3.0
Not long after I started this book I said to my husband, in exasperation, "sometimes a plot device hasn't been used because it shouldn't be used".
This is the story of recently-bereaved young girl who's grown up in London but whose parents came from Cyprus. It's the story of her parents' early lives and it's the story of a fig tree. And therein lies a lot of my problem with the book. I find nature, and humanity's impact on and interaction with nature, fascinating, but I don't like to be given my information by a talking (only on the page) fig tree.
The story told in The Island of Missing Trees is an important one and one that I knew little about, but I didn't feel that having a fig tree as one of the narrators helped enormously in the telling of that story.
This is the story of recently-bereaved young girl who's grown up in London but whose parents came from Cyprus. It's the story of her parents' early lives and it's the story of a fig tree. And therein lies a lot of my problem with the book. I find nature, and humanity's impact on and interaction with nature, fascinating, but I don't like to be given my information by a talking (only on the page) fig tree.
The story told in The Island of Missing Trees is an important one and one that I knew little about, but I didn't feel that having a fig tree as one of the narrators helped enormously in the telling of that story.