Trees

"If you want to know a place, you talk to its history." "Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life. The Trees is a fascinating, fast-paced thriller about retributive justice. It begins in 2018 in Money, Mississippi when several white citizens are killed in the same way that Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. At each of the crime scenes a mysterious Black body is found near the white body. To make matters worse, the Black body keeps disappearing and reappearing at other crime scenes of mostly white men. The body appears in old, dirty clothes holding the white men's testicles in their hands. Two Black Mississippi Bureau of Investigation detectives and a Black FBI agent go down to Money to help the mostly white police force to solve the crime. They face racism and resistance but they end up also facing another conundrum: more white people are getting killed outside of Mississippi and mysterious second bodies are being found near them as well. What in the world is going on? The Trees is a book you will definitely not be able to put down. The chapters are mostly short, similar to James Patterson's books. There are many funny moments throughout this mostly grim book. It is filled with an interesting cast of characters: rural white racists cops, Black detectives, a 100 year old mysterious Black woman named Mama Z, and so much more. The book has a cinematic feel and I could see it being adapted into a film or miniseries. My only issue with the novel is that I didn't get closure at the end about how and why everything happened the way it did. I'm certainly left with some theories, but I kind of wish it all was revealed in the last chapters. Readers of mysteries and America's dark racial history will devour this book. Go check it out!!!

This was fun, I'm not even sure what Genre it belongs to honestly... thriller, mystery, horror, revenge served on a cold plate covered in frost lol All of the above. A fun, thought-invoking read is what this was.

Mama Z, a sharp, charming yet intimidating centenarian, has gathered the stories of every lynching since she was born in 1913, her father’s being the first of seven thousand and six. “In all the files I read,” Mama Z said, “Not one person had to pay.” Damon, a professor and friend of a young woman who says she’s Mama Z’s great-great-granddaughter, pores through the files, recording the names by hand on a legal pad. The list, page and pages long. “When I write the names they become real again. It’s almost like they get a few more seconds here,” he tells Mama Z. This simple statement will shoulder a plot point that will take a full read to realize. This remembering, the cruel inhumanity, the barbarity of lynching is what this novel is about. And karma, getting what one gives. It is told murder-by-murder as those who practiced this evil “sport,” as Mama Z calls it, and their offspring, meet Emmett Till’s fate. One reviewer called it a “chilling indictment of unpunished evil.” That, it is. Others focus on implementation: the “heavy handed use of satire,” “absurdist tone,” and how the “tone of narration” eroded the reviewer’s interest in the story. Not all felt that way. One praised Everett for “bringing to life those who inhabit smaller communities in rural America.” Now, it’s important that we respect others opinions, and I truly do. But OMG, did she really say that? These comments and similar ones bear consideration, as this book carries a higher, supremely more important message from which the broad-sweep stereotyping that one might pick at could distract. This novel references a period and place where horrific brutality was met with indifference for decades, and racism is being called out as the sick and malevolent evil that it is. But will Everett’s hard charge and the sweeping characterizations of certain classes risk readers shutting down before getting to what is truly being said? Or prevent them from enjoying the wild ride that is this book? Perceval Everett’s style is highly acclaimed and justly so. It is difficult to stop reading this imaginative and tautly paced work when it’s time to cash it in for the night. So, let’s take a look at some of the complaints. The novel’s opening has been described as a biting hillbilly comedy. I must admit, there are laugh out loud moments, fair or not. But one might flinch, especially if a southerner or Mississippian in particular, as he describes modern-day Mississippi characters as morbidly obese, crass, ignorant, indolent racists popping puss-filled pimples off one another’s back and crudely lusting for Fox News personalities. “Well, it’s chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods stuck in prewar nineteenth century and living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction,” one character will say. It is unquestionable that racism and bigotry are still alive in that state, other states, the country, where I live, where you live. That fact need not be handled with kid gloves. It goes without saying that the characters who participated in or supported lynching are fair game. But are these blanket characterizations of modern-day Mississippi denizens fair? Clearly, the comeback for all things wrong with the state encircles the entirety of its envisioned citizens: “M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-P-P-I.” As in, ‘nuff said. Mississippians, not I, must speak to that, but I will stand by those who, like me, had a small town, let’s say “southern-adjacent” childhood and find racism the repugnant evil scourge of both past and modern-day America that it is. And this tack is not limited to the southern belt. Asians Ho, Chi, and Minh greet one another in that order just in case, one assumes, it is unclear that they are being grouped as Vietnamese. Then there’s the embittered beer and mustard midwestern meatpacker replaced by cheap—yes, south-of-the-border—labor and the Chicagoan cadaver processor, nipple-scrubber other-Ditka and his coworkers who desecrate human remains, using them for sport. It’s not sacrilege, the boss says. “They’re dead! Dead. Dead. Dead.” I came in with different expectations, as others did, and admittedly had a cringing sense that things were going a bit too far, chapter after chapter, as the jabs kept coming. No matter the discomfort. Everett has created something that no other could. This book, despite its barbs and defiance of things one must not do these days, will resonate and settle for a very long time. Let’s give Everett his due: the man is idiosyncratic but brilliantly so. He has spurred us to ruminate, dissect, opine, and through this, we can never forget—thousands were killed in a brutal and monstrous way. Reminding readers of the torture and murder of Emmett Till in 1950s Mississippi is well chosen as Everett argues: “The image of the boy in his open casket awakened the nation to the horror of lynching. At least the White nation. The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America. The killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-White jury.” And, I might add, they were paid a staggering sum by Look Magazine for their story.