Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
This had the makings of a very good modern Gothic novel. And then I don’t know what happened. The book just had too much going on to the point that I just didn’t care about solving the mystery of Hope-upon-Barrow village. I think if Davey had focused the novel on either the past following Octavia or the present following Kate, the book would have flowed together much more smooth. But the last minute wrinkle/reveal didn’t make a lot of sense and I just gave up even grasping what the author was going for.
The Memory Tree follows Kate Greenway and her family as the move to a new parish for her husband Ben to take over. Hope-upon-Barrow feels like a place out of time and the new home they must live in feels dark and ominous. An enormous yew tree blocks most of their view and Kate is at turns repelled by the tree, but also wants to paint it. When their 5 year old son Noah has a traumatic experience due to the tree, Kate is left wondering about it and the mysterious ceremony called Barrow Man Day the villagers do every year that staves off death. The book jumps back into the past following a teen daughter of the local reverend, Octavia. Octavia feels pulled to the yew tree after her mother’s death and finds herself making a new friend Alice, who also seems drawn to the tree as well. The book jumps back and forth between the two timelines as both Kate and Octavia learn more about the tree and what preceded it.
I don’t know what else to say, the dual timelines did not work. Neither Kate or Octavia felt very developed. I didn’t get a good sense of Kate or her husband Ben as a couple at all. We keep hearing that Kate is an artist, but honestly it seemed to be a lot of her going off and not sketching, or sketching things and being stubborn and not listening to her husband. They both don’t seem to know what to do with their son and one wonders why they had him at all at times. And then of course Octavia’s whole plot felt like it was in a different book. I don’t know what to even say about it much except again, there are Gothic elements, but I think Davey trying to tie things together just made the whole book a bit of a mess. The flow of the entire book was off because we would get a few pages with Kate and then Octavia and back and forth again. We also had some homilies in between chapters at times written by the fictional Reverend Kimble, Octavia’s father. The ending felt like it came out of nowhere (Kate’s) and it didn’t even make a lot of sense in the end. I think that sometimes some books go for shock value over common sense. And I wish I had felt affected by the ending we get, but it felt like the book just went on forever after we get the final reveal.
