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A Novel
by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
A startling, erotic novel about the need to balance care for others with care for one's self
When the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett's stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in a care facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mother's garden—convinced it contains a kind of visual puzzle—and the dormant cherry tree within it.
Caught between tending to an unwell parent and the weight of obligation to her distant daughters and husband, she becomes isolated and unmoored. She soon starts a torrid affair with an arborist who is equally fascinated by her mother's garden, and together they embark on reviving it. Increasingly engrossed by the garden, and by the awakening of her own body, she comes to see her mother's illness as part of a natural order in which things are perpetually living and dying, consuming and being consumed. All the while, she struggles to teach (remotely) Lady Murasaki's eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji, which turns out to resonate eerily with the conditions of contemporary society in the grip of a pandemic.
The Tree Doctor is a powerful, beautifully written novel full of bodily pleasure, intense observation of nature, and a profound reckoning with the passage of time both within ourselves and in the world we inhabit.
"Through a yearning first-person narration, the protagonist's trials evoke difficult but vital questions about survival and endurance... . These interrogations are threaded seamlessly into the narrator's pursuit of her own power, a pursuit that reveals just how liberating the decision to dismantle and reassemble one's self can be. An affecting story of personal transformation, as broody as it is erotic." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Mockett's loamy language describing her characters' erotic liaisons is often quite moving...This portrayal of a woman's emotional courage and restoration makes the lockdown worth revisiting, if only for a moment." ―Publisher's Weekly
"Juggling the demands of caregiving, teaching, and a budding affair with an arborist, this sensual and profound novel is an exploration of the natural cycle of life and death, echoing themes of The Tale of Genji." ―Oprah Daily, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024"
"Marie Mutsuki Mockett's luminous new novel provides the hope and beauty we need after the isolation and disillusionment of the pandemic... . This coming-of-middle-age novel―a rarely dramatized but radically important stage in women's lives―will leave me thinking for a long time." ―Celeste Ng
"Sex, death, rebirth, and literature―it's all here, in one astonishing book. The Tree Doctor made me want to go have an affair!" ―Gish Jen
This information about The Tree Doctor was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a previous novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and two books of nonfiction, American Harvest, which won the Nebraska Book Award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.
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