Didactic, so not for everyone. I loved it.

Holy shit what a beautiful book. This is a proper epic, gliding through multiple generations, poeticizing about nature growth, the balance between humanity and the planet. It manages to string you along on equals parts hope and tragedy. Stunningly beautiful sentences that make me angry because I've never come up with anything that good in my own writing. This book will leave you wrung out in the best possible way.

There’s the hint of an interesting story at the heart of this book, but it’s buried beneath unnecessary prose and rhetorical questions

I had a love/hate relationship with this book. It took me awhile to get through the first three chapters in which each time and character is introduced. I didn’t love the excess of semi-colons. I had to look up vocabulary in reading the first few sentences! (And my vocabulary is not terrible).

But once I got used to the writing style and understood the characters, I couldn’t put the book down, and read it in just a few days.


This book tells three stories. The first is of the faun, half goat half man, Chapman. He and his brother plant Apple orchards in the Ohio Territory of the late 1700s, before settlers swarmed through. The author uses colonial language on purpose.

The second story is set 50 years into the future, and is told from the perspective of John, one of the last to remember what wilderness looked like before climate change wreaked the world.

The last story begins with C-432, a being living 1000 years into the future. This being is alone, living in a glacial expanse of ice and treacherous crevasses.

As each story unfolds, mythology twines them together.

If you like Cli-fi (as much as anyone can like it), and you’re interested in a really interesting, surprising story, and you can manage all the semicolons, this book is for you!