Review by New York Times Review
IN her ambitious and much admired 2010 novel "The Lotus Eaters" (which won the James Tait Black Prize, one of the most prestigious in Britain), Tatjana Soli explored the experiences of a female war photographer who spent nearly a dozen years in Vietnam, and connected her themes and subject matter not only to Alfred Tennyson but to the "Odyssey." In her second novel, "The Forgetting Tree," she is no less daring, and no less haunting. Soli refuses to do the easy thing - she demands of the reader both patience and trust. She begins with Claire, the child of refugees from Hungary who lives an urban, bookish life until, at college, she meets the scion of a citrus ranching family from Southern California. Once Claire is living on the ranch, she is gradually converted to both hard work and love of the land, and like many converts, she comes to embrace her new faith much more deeply than those born to it. Soli effectively evokes the spare beauty of Claire's home: "The moment took Claire back to her early days, peeling an orange as she walked through the rows of trees, dropping a confetti of rind behind her, eating the sun-warmed fruit, . . . seeing eternity down the rows the long way, seeing only the next bushy trees across." But as suburbia relentlessly laps at the margins of their agricultural peace, Claire and her husband toy with the idea of selling, until a failed kidnapping plot results in the murder of their young son (a crime that colors the novel's opening pages). Like many tragedies, this one affects each member of the family in different ways - Claire's husband wants to get out, as do their two daughters, but Claire becomes even more wedded to the ranch, so that when, 15 years later, she discovers she has breast cancer and must undergo debilitating treatments, she has no way to take care of herself in her isolation. Enter Minna. Minna is a beautiful young black woman, a college-educated descendant of Jean Rhys who has lost her job at a local coffee shop through an act of misunderstood generosity. She agrees to spend the summer looking after Claire so that she can take a break from her studies and Claire's family can go about their business. Claire immediately takes to Minna, who is responsible and competent. Other people like Minna, too, including Claire's neighbor, a much-hounded Hollywood playboy whom Minna, an intellectual, doesn't treat very seriously. Claire is not a good patient, and Minna is moody, but everything seems to be progressing. Claire's treatment stalls when she visits a Mexican clinic specializing in a quack remedy, and her own doctor suspends chemo - but all in all, she feels the getaway is worth it. A larger difficulty arises when the ranch foreman reveals to Claire that Minna has been giving peculiar (and much resented) orders to himself and the workers that disrupt the regular care of the trees and lead to failure of the crop. Given Claire's attachment to the ranch, the reader may wonder that Claire clings to Minna, but Minna works by the law of intermittent rewards; she may act callous or off-putting, but every time Claire recoils or becomes suspicious, Minna redoubles her tenderness and intimacy. Minna is herself mysterious - she concocts strange drinks, paints symbols and figures on the walls of her room, promotes mystical rituals and receives disturbing phone calls. As soon as she has rendered Claire totally isolated, toward the end of the novel, the narrative switches to Minna's perspective. And the reader is thrilled. Until this point Soli has elicited our empathy by presenting a solid foundation of plausibility - Claire is plausibly single-minded, the ranch is plausibly dull, such that every other character plausibly wants to escape it, and Claire's arduous treatments are plausibly detailed - but empathy doesn't always create sympathy, and Claire becomes so irritating that Minna's late eruptions of cruelty are also entirely understandable. When Soli switches from Claire to Minna, who isn't all she seems to be, the novel takes off. Everything about Minna's past life and her inner life is shocking, dramatic and convincing. "The Forgetting Tree" builds from there. This, of course, poses a problem for a reviewer, because the best parts of the novel are all spoilers, including the explanation of how such an appealing girl got to such a forsaken spot as a citrus ranch outside Los Angeles. It is also true that from the beginning, Claire suspects she is being taken in. Her friends and one of her daughters try to warn her, but she spurns their efforts, as she has always spurned their advice to sell the farm and take the money. At one point, after Minna has left for the weekend, one of Claire's daughters goes into Minna's room early in the morning. She then awakens Claire. Claire has sneaked in once before, but now she sees something new: a red heart painted on the wall. She looks more carefully and realizes that "what she had mistaken for a long black bar was a sword plunged diagonally into the heart." She immediately talks herself out of her reflexive shock: "Although the effect should have been frightening, it didn't scare her. Claire found something brave, fierce, even exhilarating, about it." Her daughter, the one who originally introduced her to Minna, is also more fascinated than threatened - "Maybe she's into recycling," she says about a collection of empty liquor bottles, adding that the room reminds her of "a folk altar. I've seen altars like this in Santa Fe." Claire's stubbornness in believing in Minna seems related to the death of her son. Since she cannot bring herself to leave the scene of the years-old crime, the implication is that there is something more to understand about it, and maybe Minna offers that understanding. BECAUSE of the energy of the last hundred pages, "The Forgetting Tree" comes close to succeeding - to revealing the inner lives and the interactions of two women who come together by chance and develop an authentic, if troubled, relationship. But the structure, while it solves the problem of maintaining Minna's mystery almost to the climax, presents another problem. Her back story, covering some 25 years, moves much more quickly than Claire's less involving cancer drama. Minna therefore threatens to devolve into a type, an example of historical forces, rather than retaining her individual idiosyncrasies. The lesson Soli has to teach, though, like that in "The Lotus Eaters," is a salient one for the modern world: even a remote citrus ranch can be a crossroads where cultures collide, and those collisions can be life-changing for everyone involved. Soli writes with patience and wisdom about both sides of this relationship, allowing both of her central female characters the freedom to be eccentric and inconsistent, but also to learn from each other. The young woman is mysterious: she concocts strange drinks and paints symbols on the walls. Jane Smiley is the author of many novels and works of nonfiction.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 30, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Soli's follow-up to her acclaimed The Lotus Eaters (2010) is a big, sprawling novel set in California-orange country. When Claire marries Forster Baumsarg, she immerses herself in his family's citrus ranch until tragedy strikes, and a botched kidnapping leaves her youngest child dead. Devastated, Claire withdraws from her family and clings to the farm, but eventually her marriage to Forster crumbles. Claire is shaken out of her passivity when she's diagnosed with breast cancer and is forced to undergo treatment. She reluctantly bends to pressure from her daughters and hires a live-in maid. Mysterious Minna has emigrated from Dominica and is a descendant of one of Claire's favorite novelists, Jean Rhys. Claire falls under Minna's spell, not questioning her conflicting stories and allowing her to take over running the household. It isn't until late in the novel that Soli reveals the truth about Minna's past and why it's a threat to both her and Claire's futures. A lush novel with two fascinating, complicated characters at its heart.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Soli, who made a splash with her debut, The Lotus Eaters, will captivate readers again with this twisting, intriguing tale of a grieving California woman. Claire and her husband, Forster, live an idyllic life on a citrus farm in California with their three children until their 10-year-old son is murdered in a robbery. Fifteen years later, Claire and Forster have divorced, their eldest daughters are grown, and Claire is diagnosed with breast cancer. Alone on the ranch, she needs a helping hand, and along comes Minna, a mysterious young beauty. The two women forge a co-dependent bond, and Claire sinks deeper under Minna's spell, even though she senses danger lurking beneath. Though the story is slow and befuddling at times, Soli successfully paints an intimate portrait of two vulnerable women trying to make sense of their separately tragic lives-and becoming eerily entwined for their efforts. With her knack for beautiful prose and striking detail, this is a solid follow-up to her debut. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Soli's (The Lotus Eaters) second novel is a beautiful and lyrical but narratively uneven book that centers on loss, family, illness, and redemption. The death of her young son fuels Claire Baumsarg's emotional and eventual physical alienation from the rest of her family, even as she works to preserve the citrus farm she and her husband, Forster, own. When Claire falls ill, her now ex-husband and now adult daughters try to persuade her to sell the land and focus on her health. Enter Minna, a young Haitian woman whose role of caretaker quickly morphs into that of surrogate daughter. Minna's bleak past and inconsistent treatment of Claire add an element of mystery to an already dense novel. Narrator Joyce Bean's rich voice perfectly embodies the novel's heaviness. Verdict Recommended for larger general fiction collections and where magical realism is popular. ["A lush, haunting novel for readers who appreciate ambiguity, this work should establish Soli as a novelist with depth and broad scope," read the review of the St. Martin's hc, LJ 8/12.-Ed.]-Nicole Williams, Englewood P.L., NJ (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The fate of a struggling Southern California citrus farm shifts after the arrival of a mysterious Haitian woman. The second novel by Soli (The Lotus Eaters, 2010) centers on Claire, the matriarch of an orchard that's been the source of plenty of financial and emotional heartbreak. Her young son was killed there, and the aftermath of his death drove a wedge between her and her husband and two daughters. Years later, when Claire is diagnosed with breast cancer, she begins to search for live-in help and is introduced to Minna, a young woman low on housekeeping experience but high on charm: She speaks enchantingly of her academic work and her great-grandmother, the novelist Jean Rhys. Minna soon brings touches of her homeland to Claire's house, building a shrine in her room and making herbal concoctions to bolster Claire's recovery, and the new assistant also pursues a relationship with a movie-star neighbor. But all is not well: Minna grows increasingly possessive and demanding of Claire, and a later section of the novel shows that Minna's background isn't quite what she's claimed it was. This book aspires to be a multilayered story about class and race distinctions--Soli explores Claire's white guilt and cultural confusion to better get at the source of emotional divisions. Though Soli cannily shows how each woman exploits the other, her noble goal is undercut somewhat by baggy, sometimes pedantic storytelling, particularly the wooden arguments between Claire, her daughters and her ex-husband. (Soli's affinity for sentence fragments amplifies the prose's stiff feel.) Minna's own section of the novel, which chronicles her travels from Haiti to Miami to California, features some of Soli's most engaging writing, though it owes a clear debt to the troubled Haitian heroines of the works of Edwidge Danticat. Ambitious but overripe.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
