Far From The Tree Far Better Than OK

Almost exactly three months ago (and, brothers and sisters, those have been three long months) we pushed forward Darius The Great is Not Ok over Saints and Misfits. The title of the post was “Darius is Not Great, but Pretty Ok” which is about as lame a recommendation as you are going to get from this writer. So, needless to say it wasn’t going to take a real masterwork to take Darius down for us this round. Far From The Tree is not the best book I’ve read in this year’s Smackdown - that honor goes to Poet X - but I really enjoyed it on a number of levels and I think it is a book that would speak to a lot of kids. The premise of the novel itself -long lost siblings find each other and themselves - probably wouldn’t do much for me if it was just described to me, but I think the author was able to use that basic story-line to navigate through some terrain that we all tread at some point in our lives. When I first saw the title I actually assumed it was a young-adultized version of Andrew Solomon’s non-fiction work Far From the Tree which explores the relationships between parents and their dissimilar offspring. It is a thought-provoking (and lengthy) read covering everything from adoption, to parents of children who have killed other people. While there is no explicit connection between the works beside the title, they actually do cover some of the same complex ground. This novel moves beyond just parents and children and takes a pretty deep dive into the nature of relationships. The dialogue here will either wow you or grate a bit, but I was firmly in the former category. Yes, the snappy patter - particularly, between Grace and Rafe - gets a little Sorkinesque at times, but for me the dialogue helped me understand where these characters were at, both through what was said and what wasn’t said. I think this constant tension between what characters told themselves and what they were able to voice to the other people in their lives was really the essence of the novel and it took a very skilled writer to move between these two different realities for three complex characters.The main characters are fully-realized and I think there is something in each of them that will speak to kids. We move Far From The Tree on into the final round. And, we put forward Marrow Thieves as our zombie pick, unless there is some madness on the other side of the bracket that sees Poet X knocked out.