3.5 stars. ( )

The book is lyrical, mystical, yet was to me very difficult to read. In fact, I put the book aside and read about three more before I made myself return and finish. The story centers around Claire, a wife, mother and hard-working farmer in a citrus and avocado farm in California. When her children are grown and gone, and her husband settled with a second wife, she develops cancer. While not really a story focused on her cancer, The Forgetting Tree watches her life develop or degrade during her cancer journey.

Because neither of her daughters are willing or easily can provide the daily care and support Claire needs due to her cancer, the younger, flighty daughter produces a young Caribbean woman to provide live-in care. Despite the fact that she has found this person recently fired from a coffee shop, and despite the lack of references, the family lets Claire take Minna into her home and with supervision only from the sick woman, leaves the two of them largely alone. For this reader, this crucial event stretched the imagination.

Minna begins as an ideal caregiver, loving, supportive, doing everything Claire might need - and Claire falls a bit in love with the mysteries of Minna. However, with time Minna becomes less grateful and more resentful of the bounty available through Claire and become flightly, unreliable, and perhaps even dangerous.

The deft hand of Soli makes us feel we know Claire intimately, but through three-quarters of the book we only see Minna through Claire's eyes, Claire's eyes of chemo fog and perhaps more. The end of the book tells the story of Minna and we come to understand the roundedness of the story and her Minna's motivations.

I loved the setting of the orchard and it's rootstock tree, and the insights into the citrus and avocado cultivation were new to me and interesting. Soli helped me to enjoy all the sensory experiences of the orchard, and that was wonderful.

I found the climax of the book to be frustrating and unnecessary. Why was there no intervention? Why did things get to the point they did? But it was well-crafted and dramatic, no doubt.

So to me, the book was a mixed bag. I found the key relationship of the story unrealistic and the ongoing actions frustrating. On the other hand, I found Claire and Minna to be fascinating women, and their interactions full of wonder and meaning.

Meh. ( )

Claire Baumsarg marries a citrus rancher and learns to love the hard life of living off the land. But tragedy strikes Claire not once, but twice in her life, and in the midst of tragedy, Claire begins to question who she can trust. Most of the story is told from Claire's perspective, but about 3/4's of the way through the book, Soli takes us into the past of the assistant who Claire has hired, making us realize that it is hard to understand someone's motives without understanding their past. I liked this strategy of bringing us to the same story through two different viewpoints, but some of the key events were hard for me to believe. I also never felt that I got close enough to any of the characters to be more than just an outside observer. ( )

This a beautifully written novel. The descriptions of the citrus ranch at the heart of the novel are well done and Claire's obsession with the land is rendered completely believable. It is a complex and ambitious novel, and the last quarter is simply marvelous. However, it dragged in spots and the complex nature of the book is both one of its strengths and one of it weaknesses as it gets in the way of the story. It is hard to understand why the main character's friends and families would abandon her the way they do. It is equally perplexing why Minna would cause so much trouble among the workers and Octavio. ( )

Stopped listening to the tape part way thro first tape. Mother is attacked, and young son disappears. Rest of family ,left adrift. Too depressing ( )