The Overstor

Summary and Thought

Part 1- Seed
Jorgen Hoel marries and moves from Brooklyn to Iowa, starting a farm and planting a
chestnut grove. He begins ritually photographing the only tree that survives, a tradition
that holds for 4 generations of his successors. Following an overnight visit to an art
show, Nicholas Hoel comes home on Christmas morning to nd his family as died in a
gas leak
Mimi Ma’s Father, a Chinese muslim engineer, leaves communist China for
America, taking family heirlooms with him- ancient jade rings and a scroll. These are
passed down to Mimi and her sisters when Winston commits suicide as his Mulberry
tree sickens
Adam Appich and his siblings each have a tree planted for them that is re ective
of their future personality. Adam’s is a maple tree. When his sister’s tree (an elm) dies
she goes missing. Adam is the oddball of the family and has a strong predilection for
observing the world around him. After neglecting his own grades while running a
cheating business, he nds an alternate route to college when he appeals directly to one
of the Professors
Ray and Dorothy star in an amateur production of Macbeth and after a long time
of avoiding commitment, get married in Rome They agree to start a garden together
after Dorothy gets into an accident (hits a linden tree) while reacting to a letter from
Ray
Douglas Pavlicek is part of a social experiment that sends him to prison for 2
weeks. He signs up for the Army and is sent to Thailand. His plane is shot down and he
is saved by falling into a banyan tree but shatters his femur and burns his face. Later, he
moves to Idaho and notices that the trees are being cut down behind the “voter’s
curtain.” He starts planting Douglas rs
Neelay Mehta is obsessed with computers and programming from a young age.
A fall from an oak tree leaves him paralyzed. He grows up to attend Stanford and gets
an idea for a new game when he sees the arboretum
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 Patricia Westerford inherits a love for trees from her father who dies when she is
young. She becomes a scientist and writes a paper claiming trees are social. It is
ridiculed and she leaves the eld to work for the Bureau of Land Management. A
chance encounter leads her to discover her paper’s hypothesis was correct after all
Olivia Vandergriff is at the nish line of completing a degree in an area she’s
doing poorly in. She gets divorced. She goes back to her, dorm, takes a shower, goes to
turn out the light, and is electrocuted.

Part 2- Trun
Olivia survives the electrocution but there are residual effects. Beings of light convince
her to go west and save the trees. She calls her parents to tell them her plans. On the
road she meets Nick who is making tree art while living off his family’s life insurance
policy. Nick decides to join Olivia on her trip to save the redwoods in Solace, California.
Nick and Olivia bury his possessions (including his art) and head to California.
Nick and Olivia nd the protest organizers and become Watchman and Maidenhair.
Protestors dressed like animals block the interstate. Olivia and Nick sabotage the
lumber companies’ tree markings, then get together on the forest oor. They climb a
redwood tree named Midas and fall in love. They stay there for a year, becoming more
in tune with nature. The log jammers keep returning to bother them. One night, they
survive a terrible storm

Mimi tries new things while lost and without direction. She has ings, almost gets
married, travels, tries out numerous hobbies. After an argument about the trees outside
her of ce window, Mimi goes out to smell them and nds out they are going to be cut
down

Doug celebrates planting his 5,000th tree while learning that it has all been a zero sum
game. He makes his way to Mimi’s park and sleeps there, waking up when the tree
cutters come in early to do the job in the middle of the night. He’s arrested for getting in
the way. Mimi wakes to nd her tree patch has been cut. Like Olivia, something changes
inside her. Doug and Mimi meet in her lunchtime park. They decide to go to California
together to join the protests. Mimi and Doug get arrested at a protest. Later, they get
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 attacked by loggers rst, then the police at a protest. Douglas tries to protect Mimi from
the police
Mimi is red from her job once they nd out what she has been up to. Doug is
attacked in a bar and then followed by a truck which tries to run him off the road

Neelay creates 4 games, ultimately coming up with one called Mastery. Neelay’s goal
seems to be to create virtual world’s to escape this one. He lies to his mother about a girl
he is seeing. He meets up with his father in his virtual world. Neelay’s avatar is a
beggar. His father’s is a blue-skinned god

The Brinkman’s want kids but are infertile. They build a library over the years. They
forget to live lives of their own in the process. Dorothy starts cheating on Ray. Ray nds
out and they almost end their marriage. Then, Ray has an aneurysm.

Patricia writes a book on trees for the general public. She receives her rst royalty check
and with it, an invitation to rejoin the world. She becomes an expert witness for a case.
It signi es that the community respects her opinion once again.
She decides to start a seed bank which she calls an “ark.” She heads to the
Amazon

Adam’s professor dies mid-lecture. He is attracted to his new advisor and comes up
with a thesis topic about the activists who he thinks are full of it. He climbs Midas to
interview Watchman and Maidenhair. Then, a helicopter drives them out of the tree. They
are arrested.
Adam mulls over his thoughts about Olivia and Nick, then joins up with them.
He becomes Maple. They have also joined up with Mimi and Douglas, now Mulberry
and Douglas Fir. They are all attacked at a protest and Mimi and Doug suffer serious
injuries.

The protestors become arsonists. Olivia is killed in one of their res

Part 3- Crow
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 The protestors split up after Olivia’s death

Nicholas digs up his old artwork and has a run in with the police at the old Hoel farm

Mimi takes the scroll to an appraiser. Later, she masquerades as a therapist. She masters
the art of eye contact

Dorothy takes care of Ray while seeing another man. He is a violin maker. Eventually
he gets tired of playing second ddle. Dorothy stays with Ray and takes care of him.
One day she picks up one of their books and becomes interested in identifying a tree in
their backyard. She continues to do this with Ray and they eventually identify a
chestnut tree—which shouldn’t exist—in their backyard. Ray tells her that they planted
it together all those years ago. It is the daughter they never had.
Dorothy lets the yard fall into anarchy. It becomes so overgrown that the city
ghts to get it under control

Neelay encounters a disgruntled player in Mastery 8. He says the game has a “Midas”
problem. He sets out to x it by recreating Mastery. The new game is not focused on the
individual but on building the world together
His A.I. sends him a link one day. It is a digitization of the photos of the Hoel
chestnut. He reads Patty’s book
Patricia travels the world collecting for the seed bank. She spots a tree with the likeness
of the Virgin Mary in Brazil. She wakes up one night to nd Dennis has passed in his
sleep
She receives an invitation to speak at a conference called “Home Repair.” Mimi
and Neelay attend. Patty intends to poison herself onstage and Mimi tries to stop her by
using eye contact. Patty drinks anyway and tosses the rest at the audience

Douglas works for the BLM in an isolated cabin. He slips and falls of a steep ledge,
saved only by trees on the cliff’s edge. One night he gets some very young company. He
rejects her because he is still in love with Mimi
HE RETURNS TO ARSON. Later, the Freddies come to arrest him. They have his
journal where he has written about the early years with the gang
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 He heads to NYC to see Adam. They have a “chance encounter.” Adam is then
arrested after a lecture at his school. His wife visits him in prison and gets him a lawyer
who puts him on house arrest for a while. While at home, he sees a message from Nick
from his balcony. A giant painting of a tree on the NYC streets
Douglas tells Mimi about selling Adam out to the police. Adam gets two 70 year
sentences. He decides not to spare himself by naming the others

Part 4-Seed

Douglas also goes to jail. He starts listening to some of Patty’s dendrology lectures on
tape

Meanwhile, Mimi seems to become radicalized again after watching some videos. She
realizes that Doug sold himself and Adam out for her. She makes peace with herself
after feeling immense guilt

Nick heads to the northern woods to make art that can be seen from space out of trees.
It reads “Be Still.

Neelay nishes his game

Ray dies while trying to explain to Dorothy how he’d argue Adam’s case

Theme

Humans are temporary, nature is foreve

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pg. 38 “Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get the
top bunk to himself again.

pg. 56 “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant
experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective
ones. Colonies and hives.

pg. 90 “Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have
to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

pg. 133 “trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And he can
hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning

pg. 292 “Its easy for Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of
mammals seem like a minor detour.

pg. 487 “There’s a story he always loved, from the days when his legs still worked.
Aliens land on Earth. They operate on a different scale of time. They zip around so fast
that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans.

pg. 498. “Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at
the speed of trees.

Minimalism and the needs of peopl

pg. 291 “Who needs anything, except food? And those like Mimas who make their own
food-freest of all

pg. 386 “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on
assorted bling…this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside,
and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion
folks doubling down on the status quo."
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 Ownershi

pg. 115 “There is no knowing for a fact. There is only humility and looking.
pg. 311 “Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning.

People turn into different thing

pg. 117 “Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

pg. 412 “And what do all good stories do?” “They turn you into something you
weren’t.

pg. 499 “What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold
us, when we are us no longer…

Responsibilit

pg. 453 “what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut
down.

pg. 502 “This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

Beautiful Languag

Divine hail (sweet gum balls

Parched fal
Living cylinder beneath it’s bar
Green and toothy leave
A fountain of shad
A Corinthian column of woo
Sky-probing gian
Hauling himself forward by his claws over the chaos oof roots, sticks, branches, limbs,
stumps, and trunks, brous and shredded, left to rot in a tangled graveyard
Each weedy stem he puts into the rst is a magic trick eons in the making
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 The forest-The scent of Christmases older than Christ

On the concept of timeliness- there’s only the narrowest window of time in which to
really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always
been.
Beech trees-Hazy and pale in spring, but in autumn its at, wide sprays bathe the air in
gold
Cobwebs, like scarves around her face
The oaks in her forest shine scarlet still, the beeches a stunning bronze
Clouds of gold leaf glint on thin trunks tinted the palest green

The aspens wave in their undetectable breeze, and she beings to see the cryptic writing
of bears. But these slashes are old and rimmed with blackened scars; no bears have
crossed these woods in a long time. Tangled roots spill from the banks of a rivulet. She
studies them, the exposed edge of a network of underground conduits conducting
water and minerals across dozens of acres, up the rise to other, seemingly separate
stems that line the rock outcrops where water is hard to nd

Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush. The air is so twilight-green she feels like
she’s underwater. It rains particles—spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander,
skeletonize mites, bits of insect grass and bird feather

The earth gives beneath her like a shot mattres

The canopy is a colander stippling the beetle-swarmed surfaces with specks of sun
A candelabra of bough
Places remember what people forge
Cold is good for you. People keep themselves way too warm. Hunger’s good for you.
People should stay hungry
The sky is so stupid with blue that it looks like it was slathered on by a primary
schooler with nger paints
Blue noo
Trunks slice the sunlight into shard
The sky cools from dusky rose to cerulea
Limping-a dotted rhyth
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 The evergreen tips sketch and scribble on the morning sky

Alligator bar
Sweet gum balls, like tiny, medieval morning star
Cinnamon bar

Fact

Oaks and hickories synchronize their nut production to baf e the animals that fed on
them

Before it dies, a Douglas r will send its store of chemicals back down its roots and
donate these to the other trees through the root system. Giving tree

Birds, mammals, and other plants depend on dead trees. Reptiles, amphibians. It is like
a hotel. Ambrosia beetles are attracted to the alcohol of rotting wood. They plant
fungus, the fungus eats the wood, the beetle eats the fungus

Trees learn to save water. They feed their young. They send out signals to wasps to
come and save them from attacks

Serotinous cones open in heat and release buds. Forest res can spread and grow these
trees
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