Summary and Reviews of The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

Media Reviews

The Boston Globe - Margot Livesey The word "philosophical" may not be universally understood as praise, so let me add at once that she also creates rich, opinionated characters and moments of real suspense; the reader is amply rewarded for the concentration it requires to enter Dillard's world. And rewarded not least by her prose, which throughout is bracingly intelligent, lovely, and humane.

The Los Angeles Times - Susan Salter Reynolds You have to be wise to write in this kind of shorthand. You have to know something about what words can and cannot do. "Love so sprang at her," she writes of Lou, "she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again." It takes depth and width of experience to write lean and still drag your readers under the surface of their own awareness to that place where it's all vaguely familiar and, yes, universal.

The New York Times - Michelle Green As in all of Ms. Dillard’s writing, transcendent moments abound. And the last line of The Maytrees is so lovely that it may send you right back to the book’s beginning.

The San Francisco Chronicle - Heller McAlpin No less than her nonfiction, The Maytrees grapples -- beautifully -- with the question, "What was it, exactly -- or even roughly -- that we people are meant to do here? Or, how best use one's short time?" Reading this gorgeous novel is one suggestion.

USA Today - Deirdre Donahue The Maytrees showcases all the reasons people worship Dillard, whose first book, the non-fiction Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, created a sensation and won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. The Maytrees has elegant, evocative language. It describes nature in a way that would enchant the most hardened city dweller. And it captures the mystery of love, maternal as well as romantic. This novel is a treasure.

Washington Post - Marilynne Robinson The Maytrees is about wonder -- in the terms of this novel, life's one truth. It is wonder indeed that is invoked here, vast and elusive and inexhaustible and intimate and timeless.

Booklist - Donna Seaman Starred Review. In this mythic and transfixing tale, Dillard wryly questions notions of love, exalts in life's metamorphoses, and celebrates goodness. As she casts a spell sensuous and metaphysical, Dillard covertly bids us to emulate may trees--the resilient hawthorn--the tree of joy, of spring, of the heart.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In short, simple sentences, Dillard calls on her erudition as a naturalist and her grace as poet to create an enthralling story of marriage—particular and universal, larky and monumental.

Library Journal The poetic language, close observations of nature, and moving, family-centered theme in this short, low-key novel should appeal to a wide readership.

The New York Times Book Review - Julia Reed [O]n The Maytrees, despite the big words and the name-dropping…there is also good old straight narrative and prose that is often, yes, breathtakingly illuminative.

Reader Reviews

Books with similar themes

• Literary Fiction
  
• Romance/Love Stories
  
• USA
  
• New England, USA
  
• Mass.
  
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
  
• Philosophical