Review: The Girl in the Tree

The Girl in the Tree by Şebnem İşigüzel
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was so dull I literally fell asleep listening to it.

Plot: ... oh, wait. I don't think there is one. It's basically just a girl in a tree rambling about her family for a ridiculously long time.

I opted for the audio on this one and honestly I don't think it really made a difference- I zoned out instead of having to just skim a whole lot. I'm not joking about falling asleep - I must have dozed through at least 20min of this book and still didn't feel like I'd missed anything.

The problem is that it's just a billion or so anecdotes from this girl's life featuring her two best friends, her mother, grandmother, aunts, etc. and all the details of their tiresome lives. Only it's not told in any logical kind of order - it's just the girl talking about whatever random thought she has next. A large part of the story focuses on how this one time a teacher told her she was a terrible writer and honestly I couldn't help but agree with the teacher. Maybe that's why this book was written so terribly? To lend it authenticity? Intentional or not, it did not work for me at all.

It flits between a bunch of random times in the past as well as the present where she's up a tree and flirting with this dude who works nearby. Their relationship is obviously important to the story but I just did not care one bit.

And that right there pretty much sums up my entire feelings about this book: I DID NOT CARE.

There are some dark themes about political unrest and defining freedom and all manner of violence and abuse, but they just could not hook me. I feel like the meat of a good story is here but the narrator ruins it by never letting you sit in those moments and feel anything. She just jumps straight back into that one time a teacher told her she was a terrible writer.

The bonus star is for the potential, and a ray of hope for people who have more patience than me. But for me it was mind-numbingly boring from start to finish.

If you're not hooked on the style after the first 50 pages, you may not want to bother. It honestly doesn't get much more dynamic, and there's no real chronology to it so if you're not interested straight away you're unlikely to become interested later.

I hope others get more out of it than I did, though.

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