I rated “The Overstory” 4 stars, but it could have been 4.5 or even 5 stars with a better editor. Concise storytelling is hard to do, especially when an author falls in love with his own prose, and this book is just too long.

Cutting out 1/3 of both the characters and the length would have resolved my two major problems with it: The number of characters made it tough to get invested in any of them, and I ended up putting the book down multiple times as I was dragging myself through particularly slow passages. Some of the characters’ storylines, such as Neely Mehta and Dorothy and Ray, could have been cut entirely and their points made by other characters.

My other complaint is that I was knocked unconscious after being hit over the head so many times by so many metaphors about interconnectedness, property/ownership, and, of course, trees. That being said, some of those metaphors are terrific — take, for example: “They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of ‘Now’ depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”

It’s also a very moving novel that successfully gets the reader emotionally involved in the global tragedy of our disappearing forests. The prose is beautiful and the characters, though too many, are well drawn. A description of a chance meeting between two of them that I particularly loved: “They turn to one another and hug goodbye, like bears testing their strength against each other. Like they’ll never see each other again in this life. Like even then, it would be too soon.” Ultimately, I would recommend it.