Editors Reads Verdict
The Trees is Everett's most politically urgent novel — a crime-fiction satire that takes American racial violence with complete seriousness by treating it as absurdist horror. The Booker Prize shortlist in 2022 introduced it to a wider audience, and the novel repays that attention fully.
What We Loved
- The formal strategy of using genre crime fiction to approach the subject of lynching is both daring and effective
- The character of Mama Z — who has spent fifty years recording the names of lynching victims — is among the most haunting in recent fiction
- The novel's acceleration into something stranger and larger than a crime plot is handled with complete confidence
Minor Drawbacks
- The satirical exaggeration in depicting white Mississippi communities may strain credibility for some readers
- The novel's ending requires a considerable leap in register that not every reader will accept
Key Takeaways
- → The past does not stay past — American racial violence is not history but ongoing condition
- → The names of the dead have weight: recording them is a form of resistance and witness
- → Satire is sometimes the only form adequate to atrocity
| Author | Percival Everett |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Graywolf Press |
| Pages | 294 |
| Published | April 6, 2021 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Satire, Crime Fiction |
The Trees Review
Money, Mississippi. Population 452. The place where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. It is here that Percival Everett sets his 2021 novel, and the choice is not atmospheric: The Trees is a novel about racial violence in America, about what goes unremembered and what refuses to stay buried, and Money is precisely the right address for that subject.
The plot begins as a crime novel. White supremacists in Money are turning up dead — brutally killed, their bodies left alongside the mutilated corpse of a Black man who matches the description of Emmett Till. The body keeps disappearing from the morgue. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, arrive to investigate. They are smart, dry, and under no illusions about the community they have entered. The white characters they interview are rendered with a satirical broadness that is clearly intentional — cartoons of bigotry — and the detectives move through them with the weary competence of men who have been navigating this particular landscape their entire lives.
But The Trees is not finally a crime novel, and Everett is not finally interested in solving the mystery in the genre sense. The novel expands, darkens, and becomes something stranger: a reckoning with the full scope of American lynching, anchored by one of contemporary fiction’s most haunting characters. Mama Z is an elderly Black woman in Money who has spent fifty years maintaining a handwritten record of every documented lynching in American history. Her list runs to thousands of names. The weight of those names — their accumulation, their specificity, the labor of recording them — gives the novel’s more fantastical elements their moral authority.
The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 and introduced Everett’s work to a substantially larger audience than his previous novels had reached. The novel’s final movement, which expands the premise to something approaching prophecy, will not satisfy every reader — but it is earned by the precision and control of everything that precedes it. Everett is working in the tradition of Ellison and Morrison: using the full resources of American literary experimentalism to say what realism alone cannot contain.
Our rating: 4.3/5
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Trees" about?
In Money, Mississippi — the town where Emmett Till was murdered — a series of killings leave white supremacists dead alongside the mutilated body of a Black man who keeps disappearing from the morgue. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation investigate while an elderly woman has been recording the names of lynching victims for fifty years.
What are the key takeaways from "The Trees"?
The past does not stay past — American racial violence is not history but ongoing condition The names of the dead have weight: recording them is a form of resistance and witness Satire is sometimes the only form adequate to atrocity
Is "The Trees" worth reading?
The Trees is Everett's most politically urgent novel — a crime-fiction satire that takes American racial violence with complete seriousness by treating it as absurdist horror. The Booker Prize shortlist in 2022 introduced it to a wider audience, and the novel repays that attention fully.
Ready to Read The Trees?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: