RaveCleveland Review of BooksThe first thing to say about Percival Everett’s latest effort, The Trees: A Novel, is that it’s funny. Laugh-out-loud, make-people-look-at-you-weird-on-public-transport funny ... While a smart and highly inventive piece of fiction, this is more of a straightforward read than Everett’s other works. There’s no novel nested within the actual book, for one, and the prose is rhythmic but simple, with chapters short enough to devour in a few minutes ... It is, effectively, a great detective novel of the sort that it seeks to satirize, if you could call what Everett does with the genre satirization. It might be more apt to say Everett uses the often-unliterary construction of the detective novel to drive home his point.
