♥ || Twitter || ♥ || Facebook || ♥ || Booklikes ♥ || Pinterest || ♥Once you make it on to my auto-buy list as an author, it's pretty hard to get off. I am an incredibly picky reader, though, so making the list in the first place is, shall we say, difficult. (And climbing Mt. Everest is just a walk in the park, uh-huh...)Before I get into the meat of this review, I would just like to say "Merry Christmas!" My blog is about to get its 100,000th page view. Which isn't a lot, compared to some, but it's a lot to me, and I can't even tell you how grateful I am to have a solid fanbase as both an author and a reviewer. A lot of people told me that I wouldn't be able to enjoy both worlds, but minimal conflict aside, I have been. So thanks for letting me do what I love in my free time. You're stars.So back to the review -- Sheri S. Tepper is probably one of my favorite science fiction authors out there, and not enough people are reading her, which makes me so frustrated that I want to stamp my foot like a 1980s romance heroine.Tepper is a feminist science fiction author, like Ursula K. LeGuin, and writes her books with a lot of ideas about women and traditional gender roles and sexuality as the main focus. She's also somewhat of an environmentalist, so the effect that people (or people-like creatures) have on their environments with terraforming, deforestation, genetic manipulation/engineering, etc. also play common themes.If I were to put the two central themes of her books into words, they would probably be:"Women are people, and not just vessels for sex; they are capable of great things, but they are imperfect, because women, like men, are people, and people are beautiful and flawed."And: "The world around us is alive, nutures us and keeps us alive, but it is also self aware to an extent; so be careful what you do because if you step wrong, IT WILL FUCK YOU UP."THE FAMILY TREE is a very odd book, not at all like her most famous efforts -- BEAUTY, GRASS, or GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY -- which fit into a more mainstream science fiction mold. THE FAMILY TREE is a bit more fanciful and whimsical, and reads like an experimental effort geared towards a specific audience because the messages contained within are so odd. In tone, it's very much like THE FRESCO, which was equally strange and heavy-handed with its message.There are two separate narratives in here. The first narrative is Dora, a police officer who is married to an OCD engineer named Jared with a stick up his ass. He's never consummated their marriage so all she basically does is cook and clean in their loveless little relationship. But one day, Jared gets put into the hospital by a venomous tree that seems...self-aware. Intelligent, even. And suddenly, trees are popping up all over town, left and right, squeezing her city into a chokehold.The other narrative is Nassif(eh), in first person. Nassif(eh) lives in a harem although she is not one of the concubines. Her father used to be close to the sultan but then one day he was killed--by mistake--for treason. So the sultan's family put her into the palace to take care of her. The sultan's son, Sahir, is sickly, and the only way to cure him is to go to St. Weel, a monastery-like place populated by mysterious people who give prophecies. Nassif(eh) is chosen to accompany him along with his retinue, and as they continue their quest they amass several other colorful characters who also seem to be tied to what is quickly proving to be a ominous and possibly ruinous prophecy.The first time Nassif(eh)'s narrative appeared, I was very confused. She's called "Opalears" and the whole segment has a high fantasy feel to it, whereas Dora's world has a "humanity poised at the edge of a technology induced apocalypse" feel to it, with trees everywhere and geneticists being murdered for no apparent reason. I was curious how Tepper was going to tie the two narratives together, and that, more than anything, was what kept me turning pages when things started to get slow."How can things be getting slow?" I asked myself. "This is Sheri S. Tepper. Surely, she's got some great twist planned."She did. She fucking did--and it blew my mind.BUT.That being said, I do feel that the tone for this book was a bit jarring. It felt whimsical, and far too fanciful, for an adult audience. The subject matter is fairly dark, so it was weird to have a cast that seemed comprised almost entirely of comic relief. If this had actually been targeted towards a younger audience, like middle grade, I feel it could have worked better.I'm not sorry I read THE FAMILY TREE, nor am I disappointed. It wasn't what I was expecting, but Tepper is one of my favorite authors because she keeps me on my toes. Science fiction has become incredibly derivative and dystopian-laden, as of late, so I would heartily recommend her to anyone looking for something different from the same old same old.3 to 3.5 stars.
This story was very interesting. At the beginning, we meet Dora, a police officer, who is married to Jared, who is emotionally distant and very exacting in his expectations of her behavior. A weed appears in a crack by their garage, and despite Jared dousing it with weed killer, it only gets bigger over the next day or so, and when Jared tries to pull it out, he's stung by the plant and put in the hospital. More happens, but I won't go into it. Then in the second chapter, the view shifts entirely to a girl nicknamed Opalears, who's a slave in a Sultan's court, and who gets a special assignment to accompany/babysit a sullen prince on a long journey to find out the meaning of a prophecy. The POV shifts back and forth between these two stories, both interesting in their own right, but seemingly unconnected until about the middle, when they come together, along with a huge twist (which I will not divulge, but which I completely did not expect).There are some very interesting ideas, critiques on present society, and vision of the future--exactly what good science fiction should do--and the writing is also thoughtful and fairly literary. Some of the scenarios are dated--the book was published in 1997, and a few of the discussions are no longer exactly relevant, but the general thoughts and critiques are still valid now. I thought the last quarter of the story was a little weaker--some of the critique gets overdone, where the point could have been made well without going over and over it. It might even bring my rating down to 3.5 stars (3.75?) But it was still quite good, and I'd recommend it highly. I'm trying to get Jacob to read it, so I can talk to someone about the big twist! Sheri S. Tepper continues to be one of my favorite science fiction authors.
What do You think about The Family Tree (1998)?
Spoiler alert: don't read this if you want the full unprepared experience of the book.I like Sherri Tepper's stories and her style. This is a futurist fantasy and very well-written. The characters are very well-drawn and that must have been a challenge even for a writer who knows a lot about animals. Maybe it's me, but I feel like the experiments at Pandall Pharmaceutical are kinda vague, and the Very Bad Thing that some people do to the rest of the human race is not as well-defined as I'd like
—Barbm1020
Oh, Tepper, how I love you. Why have I not read all of your books?This is, at first, a confusing bunch of unrelated stories and then suddenly, magically, inevitably it is one blisteringly good story- a story that makes one question one's essential assumptions about what it means to be human, what it means to be ethical, what it means to be good. There's a richness here that wells up slowly and almost imperceptibly, a richness that comes from top-notch writing and plotting. This is a book to be read over and over. I can already tell that once is not nearly enough- and I can't wait to go back and see what I missed.
—Melody
I don't read much science fiction, so I'm kind of clueless when trying to pick out something to read from that genre. I did due diligence on Sheri Tepper only after reading the first few chapters of The Family Tree. Luckily by then I was caught up in the story. Had I known about her preposterous convictions, I would never have picked it up. Read that chilling Strange Horizons interview if you don't know what I'm talking about. I'm not very good at separating the author from their work (which is why ignorance is bliss sometimes), but in this case I'm glad I did. The Family Tree is tremendously entertaining, funny and well-plotted. There is much to sympathize with in Tepper's ecofeminism, and the crazy is kept to a minimum. I doubt I'll read more of her work though. If I'm in the mood for this sort of thing, there's always Kate Wilhelm.
—Bibliophile
