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Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell
Dec. 21st, 2025 08:09 pmArboreality
4/5. A novella consisting of linked stories of the slow climate apocalypse in western Canada, focusing on the relationship between humans and trees.
Ah, lovely. I am often skeptical of these more literary speculative projects, but this one is a winner (literally, I picked it up because it won the Le Guin a few years ago and that award is reliably looking at interesting things). A sad elegy strung through with hope, a hard book about hard things, a beautiful book about beautiful things. It’s telling a multi-generational story of the warming world through ecology. The angles here are unexpected – an old man rewilding his abandoned neighborhood, a luthier making the last violin he can make, the surly keeper of a tree cathedral.
Recommended if you like that sort of thing, and can take this book’s occasionally too self-conscious of its symbology-ness.
Content notes: The slow dissolution of modern life and what that means for treating the sick and dying.
4/5. A novella consisting of linked stories of the slow climate apocalypse in western Canada, focusing on the relationship between humans and trees.
Ah, lovely. I am often skeptical of these more literary speculative projects, but this one is a winner (literally, I picked it up because it won the Le Guin a few years ago and that award is reliably looking at interesting things). A sad elegy strung through with hope, a hard book about hard things, a beautiful book about beautiful things. It’s telling a multi-generational story of the warming world through ecology. The angles here are unexpected – an old man rewilding his abandoned neighborhood, a luthier making the last violin he can make, the surly keeper of a tree cathedral.
Recommended if you like that sort of thing, and can take this book’s occasionally too self-conscious of its symbology-ness.
Content notes: The slow dissolution of modern life and what that means for treating the sick and dying.