The Overstory
Richard Powers (2018)
“Nine strangers are pulled into the fate of the world's last forests — a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that makes trees the protagonists of human history.”
Character Analysis
The character whose arc most closely tracks the novel's scientific argument. Patricia discovers that trees communicate, is destroyed by the establishment for saying so, and is vindicated too late to save the forests her research reveals as intelligent. She is drawn from real botanists (especially Suzanne Simard) and her sections carry the novel's intellectual freight with remarkable lightness — Powers makes rigorous science feel emotionally urgent.
Flat, precise, resistant to sentiment. Avoids metaphor, uses Latin binomials, prefers passive constructions that remove the self from the observation.