A review of Memory of Trees

Along America's highways, wooden barns used to reign, and blue or white silos stood like sentries. Today those wooden barns and silos are decaying, their wooden ribcages emerging like skeletons after years of neglect, and  slowly being replaced by low steel buildings. Under this seemingly innocuous change in architecture lies a great American drama. Gayla Marty tells this larger story inside the particular story of her own family.

In her memoir of a Minnesota girlhood, she turns the farms of the Marty and Anderson families into characters in their own right. To give these characters weight, she surrounds them with the history of four generations, introducing the chapters about them with passages from the King James Bible like those she memorized as a child. To give the characters breadth, she relates them to the little-told agrarian tale of how the Roman republic fell as the empire grew. To give them life, she intersperses chapters on the various kinds of trees she first came to love on the farm, in the Bible and in her travels: nine trees paired with nine chapters.

Marty's gifts as a writer include a fabulous memory for detail, sensitivity to the lyric sound of language, excellent documentation and historical research skills, and honest descriptions of her own spirit that create a very credible, authentic voice. The structure and pacing of the book may discourage some readers, but those who persist will be rewarded.