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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 10.11.25-11.11.25
R. Lee Fryar’s Tree Gods is in some ways quite a good book. the world-building is inventive, its handling of its fantasy politics is compelling (though with some gaps), and it does, for the most part, an excellent job sustaining an appropriate level of tension throughout the book — once it hit its stride I found it difficult to put down.
Tree Gods follows two men. one is Tristan Grueder, a lawyer (already practicing at age 25??) who left his hometown in rural Georgia to escape the homophobia around him but has been called home by his sister to help deal with a challenging business opportunity for the sawmill his family owns. the other is Holly Hillwalker, a “Drus” — one of the titular tree gods, nearly-immortal ent-like beings who, for several months each year (depending on their tree’s season) are embodied in a human-like form. the Drus hate Tristan and his family for the sawmill’s destruction of their forest over several generations, killing both other Drus and their immobile female counterparts, the Dryads.
as you can see, the gender politics of the fantasy here are wild. the Drus can get up and walk around and have hundreds of Dryad consorts as well as fucking each other; the Dryads are immobile and can only communicate freely with the elected king of the forest — otherwise they can only talk to their singular Drus when he is at the magical spring at the center of the forest. notwithstanding the dubious gender politics, though, I think the Drus are compellingly portrayed: Fryar has clearly put some thought into what tree politicking would entail (more on this below), and the book spends a lot of time dwelling on their bodies — it would have been very easy to make them humans who emerge from trees, or humans with green eyes and green hair, or whatever, but Fryar does not shy away from making them genuinely inhuman, though they hide it below a human facade. it helps that they spend a lot of time, like, physically invading humans’ bodies with their roots in order to manipulate their physiology and memories. the portrayal of the Drus was probably my favorite aspect of the book.
(the one exception here is Hemlock, who is a fun character but who is identified as having needles — so this is the genus Tsuga — but whom Fryar treats as if the hemlock tree were equivalent to the two genuses of poisonous plants called hemlock (Cornium or Cicuta, which aren’t trees). people literally make tea out of hemlock trees…)
anyway. one of the questions contemporary fantasy set in the Americas always raises is the status of Indigenous people vis-à-vis its fantasy elements. frankly, most things fail this test; Tree Gods is one of the most marked failures I’ve encountered in some time, as it appears to go above and beyond the usual approaches — either ignoring Indigenous people or portraying them through colonial stereotypes as fonts of supernatural wisdom (but almost never main characters) — by simply writing Indigenous people out of existence:
Apple trees had no Drus or Dryads—not these apples anyway. They never belonged to this world [i.e., Georgia]. Like the bees, they’d come with the human invaders, long ago.
suggesting an unpeopled landscape prior to the arrival of European settlers. there is, in fairness, a passing allusion to Indigenous people later:
You humans couldn’t keep promises you made to the ones who lived here before you. You sent them away, and then you cut their world down. So much for the promises of men.
but even with this acknowledgment that someone other than the Drus existed here before settlers arrived, the implication of the text as written is that Indigenous people weren’t (aren’t?) human. I don’t think this is the intended implication, but it betrays a fundamental failure to consider the history — much less the continued existence — of Indigenous people as anything more than a rhetorical device, one that relegates Indigenous peoples to the past, as a tragic backstory, rather than recognizing ongoing colonial violence in the present.
no attempt is made to address or justify the fact that the Drus/Dryads refer to themselves by Greek names (Drus < δρῦς “tree, oak”) despite apparently(?) being native to the Americas. the Drus are also, of course, white.
the book is a romance, albeit a very dark one, and to that end Tristan and Holly basically fall in love — or lust, anyway — at first sight. this is probably the weakest link in terms of things the book is intentionally doing: I found both Tristan and Holly to be pretty flat, and their romance as a result was not especially engaging. exacerbating this is that multiple Drus spend the first half-ish of the book repeatedly attempting to erase Tristan’s memory, only for him to ~somehow~ dredge up the truth again and again. it got kind of old. in the second half of the book, when the narration stops trying to keep Tristan in ignorance and allows the plot to move forward, things pick up — this is when it got harder to put down.
there are some gaps in the tree politics, partly because once the plot starts to move it moves fast, so there are some revelations that feel like they should be a bigger deal — the villain’s plan seems to involve murdering not only a bunch of humans (whom the Drus writ large do not care about) but also several well-respected Drus, and this is just kind of…not addressed during the climax. on the whole, though, I think Fryar does a good job of balancing the Drus having recognizable political concerns — concerns that dovetail with, for example, human environmentalism but that are ultimately tangential to human ones — without sacrificing their alien perspective. it’s cool!
the flip side of this is the novel’s disinterest in human politics. human relationships are there, to some extent — Tristan arrives on the heels of being turned down when he asked his long-term partner to marry him; he has a complicated relationship with his sister, who to some extent loves and supports him but is still shaped by the homophobic context around her and resents having had to give up on her own future when their parents died while she was an adult and Tristan still a teenager. I wished this had been developed more, and also that the novel had engaged in any way with class beyond a fairly lukewarm criticism of the way the human characters regard the Drus (whom they know as a single eccentric and somehow all-male family) as poor hillbillies. like, Tristan and his sister co-own what seems to be The Only Business In Town, but their position of economic power passes unremarked.
in the grand scheme of things, many of these flaws are small: the biggest thing, really, was that I found the romance unengaging. the little things just add up on top of that. if you’re more interested in a (dark, not un-gory) fantasy romance and have more patience for some of these ideological problems than I do, you will probably enjoy this book.
moods: dark, emotional, horny, tense