The Trees

Awakening Land Series, Book 1

By: Conrad Richter

Narrated by: Danny Campbell

The Awakening Land trilogy traces the transformation of a middle-American landscape from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The trilogy earned author Conrad Richter immense acclaim, ranking him with the greatest of American mid-century novelists. It includes The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950) and follows the varied fortunes of Sayward Luckett and her family in Southeastern Ohio.

The Trees is the story of an American family in the wilderness - a family that "followed the woods as some families follow the sea." The time is the end of the 18th century, the wilderness is the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River. But principally, The Trees is the story of a girl named Sayward, eldest daughter of Worth and Jary Luckett, raised in the forest far from the rest of humankind, yet growing to realize that the way of the hunter must cede to the way of the tiller of soil.

©1940 Conrad Richter (P)2019 Tantor

wonderful history

I first read this in college many years ago and loved it so much. I was thrilled to see it here.

Good, wholesome story

I've loved this story since I first read it as a teenager and have reread many times over. I was thrilled to see it as an audiobook.

The reader does a fair job, until he came to the pronunciation of a major character name. How is it that someone cannot pronounce "Portius"? The repeated mispronunciation certainly is jarring and lowers the quality of listening to the story.

the authentic dialogue

The narration, the story line and the authentic dialogue. an older scotch Irish Appalachian Southern, many of the expressions and grammar familiar. the book feels rather short, but it is part of a trilogy. You will not be disappointed.

not for me

It's written well, and is interesting, but it is not what I'm looking for in a book. While the story flows along, every so often something gruesome and cruel slides into the narrative. You're left with this vision in your mind of cruelty and gore. Why do I want to do that to myself? Granted, the first white people who inhabited our nation had terrible hardships. I've read about it before. I don't need to wallow in the knowledge that the people had no education and died young due to disease and unfathomable pain. That, because of ignorance and the society and culture they lived in, they did unspeakably cruel things. These things are from where we descend. I just don't want to dwell on it today. I understand. I respect. I am saddened. But I'm looking for something less burdensome and more light-hearted in a book today.

A taste of early frontier life

I read this book 50 years ago and am pleased to say it’s still a favorite, holding my interest to the end. The reader has a unique voice which may have put some off—it did me initially. But by the end I felt it was the perfect voice for this book.