After finishing this book, I am very conflicted about which book to champion in Canada Reads this year. I loved Hench, but I love this book as well, but they are just so different, so how do I decide?

Two Trees Make a forest is a braiding together of Jessica Lee’s family history in Taiwan, and the natural history of the island, showing the reader how the land is shaped by people and how people shape the land. Lee tells the story of how her family ended up in Taiwan from China, and then in Canada from Taiwan, interspersed with stories of colonialism and Taiwanese mythology, descriptions of hikes, plants, birds, and even the formation of the island itself.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author, and think it is one of the best things I have listened to in a long time. The poetry of Lee’s descriptions of plants, birds, and geology, interlaced with both the Mandarin and latin names, was something I felt I could listen to all day.

This book transported me deeply into the forests, beaches, and mountains of Taiwan. The descriptions of each are deep, thorough, and lyrical. Listening felt meditative. At the same time, I learned about Taiwan’s colonized history, the impacts of war, and also the impacts of humans on the natural world. I finished this book feeling peaceful yet also troubled. Its not hard to see the parallels of Chinese colonization of Taiwan against Canadian colonization, both of the impacts of the indigenous people, but also the land, evident in this line: “In cataloguing territory, map-making was a tool of colonial governance”, which reminded me of HBC maps tracing the routes of rivers in order to claim ownership of them.

I would recommend this book, especially the audiobook, to anybody who appreciates the vastness of nature, from the smells of a tiny flower clinging to a cliff to the grandness of tectonic action creating new earth, or anybody who understands that as humans we are connected to land, and wanted to hear a new story about connections made and lost.