At the beginning of FOREST GREEN we meet Arthur Lunn. It is 1995 and we find Arthur lying in a doorway. He is either sick, drunk or has been beaten up. An ambulance comes and takes him away. From this point the story goes back closer to the beginning of Arthur’s life. The year is 1934 and the Depression has come to the Okanagan Valley. The Lunn family is fortunate because Arthur’s father is employed and works for the railroad. Times are tough but the family is getting by.
School is finished for the summer and seven year old Art is looking for adventure. A settlement of unemployed men has set up at the edge of town. The encampment referred to as The Jungle intrigues Art. He convinces his slightly older sister Peg to help him find The Jungle. They do find it but it was not the adventure they had anticipated. Arthur is captured by one of the Jungle residents. Peg tries to her best to rescue Art but does not succeed. Their captor Mister Theodore ties them to a tree. Eventually they are freed but there are conditions. Both are afraid of Mister Theodore so they comply. Subsequent events following the incident add to Art’s already traumatized state.
The story continues to follow Art through adolescence, his war years and his years working in the forest.
While a lot of Art’s trouble were a result of bad decisions I still felt empathy for him. I thought FOREST GREEN was well written and accessible. It would be a excellent choice for a book club.
Thank you to Penguin Random House for providing an advanced digital copy of FOREST GREEN.

Forest Green starts in 1995, when the main character, Arthur Lunn, is homeless and badly beaten in the streets of Vancouver. The story then travels backwards to 1934, when Art was seven years old and witnessed an event that would shape the rest of his life. The rest of the novel follows Art through the decades of his life, from his experiences during WWII, his relationships, and his work as a logger, and explores how his childhood trauma and the guilt that accompanies it continues to haunt him.

Forest Green is a well-written and thought-provoking novel. Even though it deals with heavy topics, it is a soft and quiet story and I was fully invested in Art’s life. The book ends on a hopeful note, which I really appreciated.

I first encountered Kate Pullinger about a decade ago when her Mistress of Nothing won the 2009 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. I would not be surprised if Forest Green wins some literary awards.

The book begins in 1995 with a homeless man on the streets of Vancouver. Via flashbacks, we are told the story of how he came to be in this situation. The first flashback is to 1934 when Arthur Lunn is seven years old and living with his family in the Okanagan Valley. His family is largely unaffected by the Great Depression, but there is an encampment of unemployed men nearby. Art and his sister Peg encounter a man at the camp and that meeting leads to a tragic event which leaves Art with feelings of guilt for the rest of his life.

The novel examines how childhood trauma can shape a person’s life. Because Art feels responsible for a tragedy, that “what had happened was his fault,” he feels others are always judging him so he makes a major decision about his life “to stop people thinking of him as the boy whose idiocy led to that terrible night.” When another tragedy occurs, Art feels even more guilt and even less able to escape “the pressure of the past” which he feels most strongly when with his family. He begins a nomadic existence in logging camps because “Being with his family made Art restless . . . always wanting to leave as soon as he’d arrived.” He is rescued by love but when yet another tragedy occurs, he is unable to recover.

Art spends much of his life as a logger so the book does provide glimpses into the logging industry in British Columbia and how attitudes to forestry have changed. Art thinks of trees “as a resource to be taken from the land, always there, infinite” even when the province looks like “a patchwork, as though it’s been scalped by a no-good barber who kept cutting off more hair in the hope of fixing his mistakes.” But then he encounters the forest green, the rainforest in the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii), and he finds peace; he wants “to stay there, rooted, breathing the rainforest air.” And he realizes that “When you felled one of those trees, you were bringing hundreds of years of living to an end. . . . And it turned out that those trees, well, those trees were not infinite. That got to Art a little at the end.”

In the end, the forest serves as a metaphor for human life: “trees in a forest are all connected via their roots, that the forest floor is a kind of communication network made of moss and insects and fungi and all manner of life, and the forest itself a single organism, like a living soul regenerating through an endless cycle of rot and regrowth.” Art feels like a solitary tree until he re-connects to the forest. And the message is that we are all part of a single living soul.

Art emerges as a complex character. His life is not easy. Though readers will not agree with some of Art’s choices, they will understand and empathize. Though Art’s is only one story, it reminds us that there are many such stories among the homeless and addicted. A book that can inspire people to have compassion for the downtrodden is a good book.

The book is not especially lengthy, and the plot seems simple and straightforward, but it is thought-provoking and emotionally compelling.

Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

I first want to thank NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for trusting in me to review this book.
I really enjoyed Forest Green. It is a very well written book and I couldn't put it down. Art had a rough start to his life. Starting off young with a lot of trauma sets him up for a life of anxiety and hardship. I really appreciated how well his story flowed and the ending was perfect. I will admit the setting drew me in. Being from British Columbia myself I could really picture the places that were talked about. I would definitely recommend this book. #netgalley #penguinrandomhousecanada #doubleday #forestgreen

I'm usually a big fan of Kate Pullinger's books but this one just didn't work for me even though it took place in my home province. The story just never captured my interest and I struggled to finish it. I won't be posting a review for this one on Goodreads.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC in exchange for a fair review.

I thought this book was quite good and I can think of many readers who will enjoy it. I really appreciated that the book was set mostly throughout BC. There is something special about being able to visualize the place where the story is happening. A long period of time is covered in quite a short book so although I appreciated the story being told about the trauma of Arthur Lunn's childhood, which set him on a tragic life trajectory, it felt somewhat rushed. I did feel a lot of empathy for Arthur and I hope a lot of people read this and feel that empathy within themselves for our houseless community members.

Have you ever wondered what happened to someone to make their life turn out the way it has? Kate Pullinger answers that for Art Lunn in Forest Green. A small child who had a terrible event happen to him shaped the rest of his life with guilt and lies. As I followed Art through the history of his life, I wanted nothing more than to take his hand and help him through it.. Gritty and raw yet set to a beautiful backdrop of the forestry and oceans that line British Columbia. The juxtaposition of physical landscape to emotional sets this book above the rest.