This was lovely. It has strains of magical realism with lovely interwoven stories about the characters of a community. Beautiful book. ( )

I live near Canandaigua, so this book was really interesting to me. The charactors are well defined and I enjoyed the mystical quality. There was a good deal of suspense as well. ( )

For readers who are primarily interested in the story line of a novel, this book may not satisfy. Ruby's deft hand with language and ability to evoke moving, crystalline images with words, however, will more than delight a different sort of reader. The touch of magic that weaves through the book adds a dimension of enjoyment and the characterizations, while lightly handled, are engaging. ( )

About half-way through this book, I began skimming the large paragraphs and only reading the dialogue. Had I not done this, I would have put it down and never looked back. However, I was reading it for a group, so I wanted to at least know how it ended.

What's the book about? A lot of people who, to this point, didn't follow their dreams and are really depressed about how their lives turned out. And some addicts and the ghost of a dead little boy.

I just found the whole thing depressing and boring. If you're going to paint a sad story, at least make me care about the characters first. Instead, the reader is just thrown in to their sad lives and we find out (over and over) about why they are so messed up and unhappy. Perhaps others can read it and find some hopeful message in the way things turn out, but by that point, I just didn't really care what happened to them anyway.

Just not my kind of story... ( )

A truly beautiful book! It almost made it to 5 stars, other that one issue that might well be a positive for other readers.The characters were amazing. I enjoyed the variety, each with a strong personality, shaped by life experience.Each character carried the past with them-- Melanie, her sister Maya, and her mother carried the death of Luke, the youngest of the three children. Melanie had finally seemed to put it behind her so she could get on with her life with her baby Lucas, and his father, Lion. When she disappears, it's blamed on her past with drugs, but Lion and Leila know better.Grant and Echo are haunted by their past together, wondering if their relationship should have ended many years ago, or at least if it should have ended differently. Each has their individual burdens. Grant has a legacy from his father that he doesn't understand, and a broken marriage he hasn't come to terms with. The paths of each of these characters have crossed in the past, and continue to do so in the book. As they come together to find what happened to Melanie, they learn about them selves as well.The plot revolves around the search for Melanie. I was very intrigued by this aspect of the story, mostly for what it showed about the characters by the actions they took. Even with all of the characters in the book, the plot still took a clear, relatively logical path.When I picked up this book to read, I'd forgotten that the description I'd read included "magical realism". This aspect of the story didn't really manifest until I'd been reading a while, and it took me by surprise. As the magical aspects permeated the story more and more, I appreciated how they helped build the web holding the book together. It was beautiful, internally consistent, and all together well done.I had only one complaint about the book, and my complaint may well be someone else's favorite aspect of The Language of Trees. While I was reading, the writing pulled at me, asking me to look at it. I prefer the words to simply tell me the story. Every time I stopped to pay attention, I agreed that the words were beautifully written, but it wasn't until I realized the book is written in present tense that the words stopped calling me out of the story. ( )