Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica J. Lee
Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica J. Lee
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Two Trees Make a Forest
In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts

Author: Jessica J. Lee

Narrator: Nancy Wu

Unabridged: 6 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/04/2020


Synopsis

An exhilarating, anti-colonial reclamation of nature writing and memoir, rooted in the forests and flatlands of Taiwan

A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew.

Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities.

Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre-shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.

About Jessica J. Lee

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and the children's book A Garden Called Home, and coeditor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She is the founding editor of the Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. She lives in Berlin.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Allison ༻hikes the bookwoods༺ on January 25, 2021

Boring. So boring. I’m a bit of a family historian and enjoy researching my family tree and piecing together a narrative about my ancestors lives, so I can understand what Lee is trying to accomplish here. I just don’t think it holds interest for the average reader. I mean, even if you don’t find th......more

Goodreads review by Krista on May 11, 2021

The trees are so tall I can hardly see their branches, their green foliage hanging in flat sprays that droop ever so slightly near their crowns, the way shaggy hair might drape around one’s neck. The greenery's sloping shape, held against the military exactitude of the trunks, resembles to me the......more

Goodreads review by David on February 23, 2021

It's another in a growing work of literary nature writing that I find I'm a sucker for. From The Overstory to Greenwood it's the personal entwined with the natural world and Lee, as an environmental historian, is uniquely poised to tackle this growing genre. It is the history of Taiwan, a relatively......more

Goodreads review by fatma on December 31, 2020

Jessica J. Lee is such a beautiful writer, and Two Trees Make a Forest is such a gentle book. I'm not typically one for nature writing; I have a hard time visualizing descriptions of the natural world, partly because I don't have the vocabulary to understand it and partly because I just find it hard......more