[AnotherCat]

Hope I am not too late to comment on this book; I queue jumped it from the bottom of my to read list, which if I hadn't of meant it probably would never have got read, to around number five; because it is Australian. Overall I am glad that I did so.

I found all the characters very flat but I felt the book got by just fine with that being so and was probably an important part of its structure. The thing that took the gloss off for me was the use of the short stories from the mysterious young man. That is just me though and does not distract, in my view, from the merits of the book, I just don't enjoy short stories and never read them. So to have them cropping up in the book was a downside for me, however if they weren't there the author would have to contrive some other structure which may have been less successful. I probably lost some of the book because I tended to skim the mysterious young man's stories.

I was left a bit puzzled by the ending but that may have been because I missed some essential reference earlier in the book. I took it that we were left with Ellen 'getting her man' but the inference that was that he turned out to be the first with the identification of the trees within Holland's rules and that left me puzzled. I recalled the early scene where Ellen just sees the back of the neck of the young man while he is with Holland going through the list of labels but I took this as being that the list was Holland's and not one that the young man had prepared through his own identification of the trees. If that was the case I don't see how he could have been first.

The alternative that came to mind was that the young man labelled all the trees by himself and Ellen was meeting him while he was doing so. But to have completed that before Cave completed his identification of them would have mean that Cave would have had, at least by the end of his identifying, labels on the trees to read and so his task was trivial. It may have been that I missed something; there are a few things in the book that are only mentioned in a sentence or two but which, much later in the book, are important. For example the young man and Holland checking the labels early in the book is covered in one or two weak sentences but recollection of it is important to the ending.

But it may be that I just missed something that gives a sensible resolution to the understanding of the ending; I have had a couple of short skims to recheck, but with no result.

I feel it is a book that some will not find enjoyable and that through a weakness in the book rather than necessarily being the fault of those readers. Why I feel that it would be much the book's fault is that the basic story is a very simple one, it seems it is often referred to as a "fairy tale", but complicated by injection of the eucalypts, short stories, etc., in a structure that I think is one that will divide reader's impressions of its story telling. Which reminds me that there were some sentences that I felt were a bit lumpy reading for me and I ended up rereading them for understanding.

But for all that, as I said I am glad that I read it as the storyline was interesting for me, as was the exposure to the book's structure (even though, as I mentioned, the structure, by injecting short stories, was not entirely to my personal liking).