Harry’s Trees

Grief works in mysterious ways in this winsome but overstuffed novel from Cohen (The Man in the Window). Forestry service bureaucrat Harry Crane and rural ER nurse Amanda Jeffers are widowed on the same day. While Harry withdraws into the job he hates and spirals into a bleak depression, Amanda focuses her attention on her daughter, Oriana, who imagines that her father will return as an angel or a bird. But after Harry decides to kill himself and sets off to do so in the woods near Amanda’s home, an accident gives him a chance to connect with Oriana and undertake a life-changing adventure that forces all of them to question where magic (or luck) ends and reality (or chance) begins. Unfortunately, Cohen tries to do too much in an otherwise straightforward narrative. Appalachian decline, the role of books in society, health care dysfunction, and dendrology are all packed into the novel, but only add clutter to the central narrative. The result is a story that never truly gets beneath the surface. [em](June) [/em]