The Island Of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

 

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family's troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak's best work yet.

MY REVIEW: 5 Stars 

This book definitely made me cry 🥺



I don’t even know what to say really. I loved the Fig telling her part of the story. I mean as a tree lover that was something super special. Kostas with his love of animals and nature made me love him from point A. But, there are some sad things in the book. I’m not even going to hint at those parts, they involve people, wildlife and trees. The owners of The Happy Fig damn near broke me. (Read the book) 

I’m just going to leave with a few quotes, the first is from Ada. I’ve done exactly what she does in this quote but it was many times in my home and not school. And the I’ll leave some from the Fig. 

*Ada*

Her voice cracked but persisted. There was something profoundly humiliating yet equally electrifying about hearing yourself scream - breaking off, breaking away, uncontrolled, unfettered, without knowing how far it would carry you, this untamed force that rose from inside. It was an animal thing. A wilderness thing. Nothing about her belonged to her previous self at that moment. Above all her voice. This could have been the high shriek of a hawk, the soul-haunting howl of a wolf, the rasping cry of a red fox at midnight. It could have been any of them, but not the scream of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.

*Fig*

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else’s starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected. 

I don’t have any of their charms, I admit. If you were to pass me on the street, you probably wouldn’t give me another glance. But I’d like to believe I’m attractive in my own way. What I lack in beauty and popularity, I make up for in mystery and inner strength. 

Most arboreal suffering is caused by humankind. 
Trees in urban areas grow faster than trees in rural areas. We also tend to die sooner. 
Would people really like to know these things? I don’t think so. Frankly, I am not even sure they see us. 
Humans walk by us every day, they sit and sleep, smoke and picnic in our shade, they pluck leaves and gorge themselves on our fruit, they break our branches, riding them like horses as children or using them to birch others into submission when they become older and crueller, they carve their lover’s name on our trunks and vow eternal love, they weave necklaces out of our needles and paint our flowers into art, they split us into logs to heat their homes and sometimes they chop us down just because we obstruct their view, they make cradles, wine corks, chewing gum and rustic furniture, and produce the most spellbinding music out of us, and they turn us into books in which they lose themselves on cold winter nights, they use our wood to manufacture coffins in which they end their lives, buried six feet under with us, and they even compose romantic poems to us, calling us the link between earth and sky, and yet they still do not see us. 

Long after the island was partitioned and the tavern fell into disrepair, Kostas Kazantzakis took a cutting from one of my branches and put it in his suitcase. I guess I will always be grateful to him for doing that, otherwise nothing of me might have remained.

Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾