The Trees

Finished The Trees, the first book in Conrad Richter's Awakening Land Trilogy. It's the story of the Luckett family, mother, father and four children, who move from Pennsylvania to the untouched forests of Ohio in the late 18th Century. They are the first people to settle there and life is strange and hard. The artifacts and colloquialisms of the time are deftly woven into the story. The only other book I've read of woodsy life is Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, which was much less raw and set about a hundred years later and much farther west. The characters in The Trees are interesting and well drawn. This is a very unusual book.