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A review by sherwoodreads
The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge
Copy received courtesy of NetGalley
The Lie Tree is set in the UK ten years after Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.
Faith is a young teen fiercely interested in the natural sciences, an interest she shares with her famous father, who is also an Anglican minister. When I saw that, I hailed it with inner relief, thinking that finally here would be a book that wrestles with the changing of a paradigm, without going down the usual over-simplification trail by making religious faith and scientific endeavor mutually exclusive. With, of course, the religious characters being narrow-minded, clinging to ignorance, and petty, if not downright eeevil.
Nope, it turned out that Hardinge was trotting down that well-worn path—while offering a fantastical element.
The two never fit together well, and it’s not helped by the fact that pretty much all the characters are hateful until the last portion of the book, with an extra helping of anger about how women are suppressed and erased by the Victorian ideal of innocence and frailty.
The women in the story turn out to be interesting (unlike the men) but it takes nearly the entire book to get there. Faith eventually redeems herself, too, when it’s almost too late to care. Hardinge’s writing is vivid and strong—there is a powerfully insightful comment about love that, had the rest of the book been raised to match it, would have made it the best book ever—which carried me through to the end in a story I would have abandoned in lesser hands.
She also gives us two interesting characters in two boys, Faith’s brother Howard, and Paul Clay, a boy Faith’s age, which relieved the unrelenting pettiness and meanness of the story enough to get me through to the payoff.
Apparently this book won a prestigious award before its US release, making me wonder if it was in part due to Victorian Anglicans being a popular target for getting a hate on that one can feel totally self-righteous about.
The Lie Tree is set in the UK ten years after Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.
Faith is a young teen fiercely interested in the natural sciences, an interest she shares with her famous father, who is also an Anglican minister. When I saw that, I hailed it with inner relief, thinking that finally here would be a book that wrestles with the changing of a paradigm, without going down the usual over-simplification trail by making religious faith and scientific endeavor mutually exclusive. With, of course, the religious characters being narrow-minded, clinging to ignorance, and petty, if not downright eeevil.
Nope, it turned out that Hardinge was trotting down that well-worn path—while offering a fantastical element
Spoiler
that essentially makes the central symbolic element of the Adam and Eve myth true, the Tree of Knowledge, or the Lie Tree, or Mendacity Tree, which feeds on human lies and exudes a kind of evil miasma full of visions that point toward hidden truthsThe two never fit together well, and it’s not helped by the fact that pretty much all the characters are hateful until the last portion of the book, with an extra helping of anger about how women are suppressed and erased by the Victorian ideal of innocence and frailty.
The women in the story turn out to be interesting (unlike the men) but it takes nearly the entire book to get there. Faith eventually redeems herself, too, when it’s almost too late to care. Hardinge’s writing is vivid and strong—there is a powerfully insightful comment about love that, had the rest of the book been raised to match it, would have made it the best book ever—which carried me through to the end in a story I would have abandoned in lesser hands.
She also gives us two interesting characters in two boys, Faith’s brother Howard, and Paul Clay, a boy Faith’s age, which relieved the unrelenting pettiness and meanness of the story enough to get me through to the payoff.
Apparently this book won a prestigious award before its US release, making me wonder if it was in part due to Victorian Anglicans being a popular target for getting a hate on that one can feel totally self-righteous about.