The Forest #

Edward Rutherfurd #

February 16, 2023

4.5/5

I have only read one other novel by Edward Rutherford, “Paris”, which has become one of my favorite books and one that I go back to reasonably often. I bought this book quite a long while ago, but didn’t finish it the first time around, giving it another shot though was absolutely a great idea.

This book was an incredibly engaging historical sequence and story of a couple different old families of the New Forest region in southern England. Unlike “Paris”, which quite often jumped back and forth in time and between stories of families, “The Forest” went through each time period chapter by chapter, causing a more fluid story in some sense. One other interesting difference was how “Paris” appeared to have a primary story/timeline one followed (late 1800s to the early 1900s), however, “The Forest” does not have this. Each time period is important and engaging in its own way, and each former time period would be recalled and regaled in later chapters in some way.

The one common downside of Edward Rutherford books is that there are very often phases of the story that feel incredibly clunky, which is in part due to the massive amounts of factual information being provided. If I recall correctly, in the first chapter, there was a few page long discussion of trees in the New Forest, and while it was certainly interesting, it felt a little bit out of place compared to the story that was just taking place. In this sense, the fact delivery nature of the novels can be clunky, but really I’ve read no other author’s work that can handle it very smoothly. In some sense, it feels like a hazard of the trade.

Each chapter was very engaging and fun, and I often felt sad at leaving the characters I had finally grown accustomed to in the last chapter to sally forth and read about their descendants. I highly recommend this book both for its story and its historical delivery.