Official Review: The Story of the Trees with Hands that M...

[NanoWasabi]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "The Story of the Trees with Hands that Moved" by Biju Nair.]

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“The Story of the Trees with Hands that Moved” is a book about a group of people working for an unspecified company. All of a sudden, the company announces that they are downsizing, and that one of their two groups of employees will be let go. But the real bulk of the story is when one of the characters tells a tale he remembers from his grandmother, about trees with hands that moved.

This book is a lot like an egg; there’s a hard shell that you have to get through before you get to the good part. The company story is the shell around the tale of the trees. So the company devises a contest where the workers of each group have to complete a specific project, and the group which does better will be the one that can keep working. But they eventually find out that the contest is rigged so that one specific group will win. The members of the other group then talk about burning down the company for its unfairness.

Then, one of the employees tells the story about the trees. It’s about a farmer named Vest who is incredibly jealous of his brother Harv’s crops. One day, a man comes with magic tree saplings that mirror their owner’s personality, and offers them to Harv. Vest convinces the stranger to give him some saplings as well, and then he attempts to sabotage his brother’s crops, which turns out to be a bad idea. The moral is that revenge never works, and you shouldn’t keep anger inside yourself until you burst.

I think that this book was enjoyable, but it would have been better if it had just been the story of the trees. The company part felt unnecessary and undeveloped, and the characters meant nothing to me. I totally didn’t care if they were fired, but I did feel really bad for Harv when his crops were destroyed. As for editing, there were quite a few poorly worded sentences, and a couple of typos, but there weren’t enough to detract from the story.

Overall, I give “The Story of the Trees with Hands that Moved” 3 out of 4 stars. I was starting to get disappointed with the book, until I got to the tree story part. It was enjoyable enough to get me through to the end, even though there was another company part afterwards. I think that this book would be enjoyed by people who read classic folk tales, because it closely resembles that type of literature, despite being an original story.

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