Subject: Review of The Tree People by Stokes (fiction, mystery, Nat. Am.)

From: [email-masked] (Steve Brock)
Date: 18 Apr 1995 01:48:37 GMT

THE TREE PEOPLE by Naomi M. Stokes.  Forge/Tom Doherty Associates,
175 Fifth Ave, N.Y., NY 10010, (800) 221-7945, (212) 420-9314 FAX. 
413 pp., $22.95 cloth.  0-312-85633-4

                     Reviewed by Steve Brock

     I'm not a big fan of Jane Auel, and when I found her name on
the cover of "The Tree People," saying that the book was "Totally
fascinating," I was not happy.  "Here's another syrupy-sweet tale
of an ancient people struggling with their emerging ability to
reason," I thought.
     But I tunneled through the Auelish triggering of the plot, in
which a "bad" Quinault shaman is buried alive in 1490 and a cedar
tree planted on his grave to trap his soul, and resurfaced into the
series of grisly murders that occur in the present-day when the
soul is liberated in the 1990s on Washington's Olympic Peninsula.
     With a hefty dose of myth and an almost hypnotic sense of
place, Stokes relates how a 500-year-old sacred cedar is toppled by
the employee of a white-owned logging company, and the Quinault
policeman who must locate her guardian spirit and journey to the
"Land of the Dead" in order to force the shaman's spirit back into
the ground.
     If the reader overlooks the long passages on saving old-growth
forests and the Author's Notes (in which Stokes seeks to validate
several of her plot devices which don't need to be legitimized),
they will find a thrilling tale that fittingly delineates the
danger, and the necessity, of retaining "the old ways."  Grade: B.
     Also by Stokes: "The Castrated Woman: What Your Doctor Won't
Tell You About Hysterectomy" (1986).