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The Crying Tree: A Novel, by Naseem Rakha
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Irene and Nate Stanley are living a quiet and contented life with their two children, Bliss and Shep, on their family farm in southern Illinois when Nate suddenly announces he’s been offered a job as a deputy sheriff in Oregon. Irene fights her husband. She does not want to uproot her family and has deep misgivings about the move. Nevertheless, the family leaves, and they are just settling into their life in Oregon’s high desert when the unthinkable happens. Fifteen-year-old Shep is shot and killed during an apparent robbery in their home. The murderer, a young mechanic with a history of assault, robbery, and drug-related offenses, is caught and sentenced to death.
Shep’s murder sends the Stanley family into a tailspin, with each member attempting to cope with the tragedy in his or her own way. Irene’s approach is to live, week after week, waiting for Daniel Robbin’s execution and the justice she feels she and her family deserve. Those weeks turn into months and then years. Ultimately, faced with a growing sense that Robbin’s death will not stop her pain, Irene takes the extraordinary and clandestine step of reaching out to her son’s killer. The two forge an unlikely connection that remains a secret from her family and friends.
Years later, Irene receives the notice that she had craved for so long—Daniel Robbin has stopped his appeals and will be executed within a month. This announcement shakes the very core of the Stanley family. Irene, it turns out, isn’t the only one with a shocking secret to hide. As the execution date nears, the Stanleys must face difficult truths and find a way to come to terms with the past.
Dramatic, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting, The Crying Tree is an unforgettable story of love and redemption, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the transformative power of forgiveness.
- Sales Rank: #336398 in Books
- Published on: 2010-07-06
- Released on: 2010-07-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.98" h x .73" w x 5.18" l, .56 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Amazon.com Review
Jacquelyn Mitchard Reviews The Crying Tree
Jacquelyn Mitchard's first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, published in 1996, became the first selection of Oprah's Book Club. Six other novels, three children's books, and a young adult novel followed, including A Theory of Relativity and The Breakdown Lane. Her most recent novel is No Time to Wave Goodbye. Read her guest review of The Crying Tree:
I didn’t want to read The Crying Tree this summer. For one thing, I was busy with a book of my own coming out in just a few months. I was intrigued, though, because I thought the plot sounded similar to my own 2004 novel, Cage of Stars, in which there also is a crime that not even a mother--or perhaps only a mother--could forgive.
I opened the book and read one page. I looked up. Six hours had passed and the story of Irene Stanley and her husband Nate, their murdered son, Shep, and their militant daughter, Bliss, had summited and earned its conclusion. I had fallen so under the spell of Naseem Rakha’s voice and plot that I had lost all track of time. The characters were alive. Their choices were wrenching. Their sins and their ignorance were our own.
The Crying Tree is not perfect. I was able to see the ending coming. But the pace and genuine aspirations of this story were so satisfying that I didn’t mind. The creation of the characters is redemptive and makes me hungry for more words from Rakha. The mother, Irene, is as adoring and blind as any mother, indeed as I am. The father’s hates and fears, his shame, are sadly all too believable.
For her son and her daughter, Irene dares to dream beyond her the blue-collar days in ways Rakha renders with pitch-perfect detail. When she loses her treasured son, she also loses the thread of that dream. Rallying from the bleached and hollow pod she has become to finally claim it again for her surviving child is what finally re-connects her to life--and to a truth that is as inevitable to the reader as it is heartbreaking.
This is a mesmerizing book--one any writer would envy and any reader would love.--Jacquelyn Mitchard
(Photo © Liane R. Harrison)
Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Naseem Rakha
Question: How did the idea for the book originate? Had you always been interested in the Death Penalty?
Naseem Rakha: In 2003, I met a woman during a peace rally in my small town of Silverton, Oregon. She had just visited an inmate on San Quentin’s death row—an inmate who, twenty-one years earlier, had been convicted of killing her daughter. For years, she had lived for this man’s death, believing that his execution would end the pain of her loss. What she found, however, was that after ten years of waiting and hating, she had to give it up. She wrote the man and told him she forgave him. That arc, from the most desperate kind of anguish to reconciliation and even love stunned me, and compelled me to explore this journey through The Crying Tree.
Question: As a mother yourself, was it difficult to write from Irene Stanley’s perspective about the death of her child?
Naseem Rakha: Writers of fiction must have empathy—the ability to feel what others feel, and then express those emotions in a way that keep them alive. So yes, feeling Irene’s anguish over her son’s death was difficult, but so was Nate’s anguish, and Daniel’s, and Bliss’s and Tab Mason’s. On the other hand, life also offers us moments of inspiration, joy, and redemption, and as I wrote The Crying Tree, those life-affirming emotions far outweighed the weighty nature of the subject.
Question: Without giving anything away, secrets—Nate’s, Shep’s, Irene’s—are the driving force behind the tragedy in this story. When you first started writing, did you know how the story was going to unfold?
Naseem Rakha: I knew how the story would start, I knew the conflict, and I knew how I wanted the story to end. Everything else was a surprise. Sometimes a very big surprise.
Question: Through your research and writing, has your opinion about the death penalty changed?
Naseem Rakha: I did not write The Crying Tree to make a statement about the Death Penalty. Instead, I wanted people to confront the question of forgiveness. What does it look like, what does it take, and what can it possibly give? Intellectually, I oppose capital punishment. But, if faced with the murder of a loved one, I have no idea if my moral objections would stand up against my desire for vengeance. This is a question one hopes to never face, but perhaps through this book people will think more about their own capacity to live beyond loss.
Question: Who are some of your favorite authors? Were there any books that particularly inspired you to write this novel?
Naseem Rakha: I think of authors like Kent Haruf, who can tell deep stories about ordinary lives. I think of Jane Smiley, and how she brings characters to life through dialogue and setting. I think of Truman Capote and his ability to report an event and make it feel as tangible as knife cutting through a loaf of bread. No one particular novel inspired The Crying Tree, but voices of other authors informed my own writing style.
(Photo © Gretchen Dow Mashkuri)
From Publishers Weekly
This complex, layered story of a family's journey toward justice and forgiveness comes together through spellbinding storytelling. Deputy sheriff Nate Stanley calls home one day and announces he's accepted a deputy post in Oregon. His wife, Irene, resents having to uproot herself and their children, Shep and Bliss, from their small Illinois town, but Nate insists it's for the best. Once they've moved into their new home, Shep sets off to explore Oregon's outdoors, and things seem to be settling in nicely until one afternoon when Nate returns home to find his 15-year-old son beaten and shot in their kitchen. After Shep dies in Nate's arms, the family seeks vengeance against the young man, Daniel Joseph Robbin, accused of Shep's murder. In the 19 years between Shep's death and Daniel's legal execution, Bliss becomes all but a caretaker for her damaged parents, and a crisis pushes Irene toward the truth about what happened to Shep. Most of the big secret is fairly apparent early on, so it's a testament to Rakha's ability to create wonderfully realized characters that the narrative retains its tension to the end. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Beautifully written, expertly crafted, forcefully rendered. Naseem Rakha lays bare all the ambiguities and nuances of our culture in a story that is compelling and deep. The Crying Tree is a story of forgiveness and redemption, but at its core it is a love story as well, and that is the most powerful story of all."
--Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain
In The Crying Tree Naseem Rakha uses grace and honesty to tell the gripping story of parents losing a son to murder and their desperate hope that an execution will provide closure, while allowing readers to consider the idea of forgiveness as a means of healing.
--Randy Susan Meyers, author The Murderer's Daughters
Naseem Rakha writes with both clarity and sympathy about one of the most mysterious and evasive of human impulses: forgiveness. The Crying Tree is a memorable and deeply humane novel.
--Jon Clinch, author Finn and Kings of Earth
This complex, layered story of a family's journey toward justice and forgiveness comes together through spellbinding storytelling. Deputy sheriff Nate Stanley calls home one day and announces he's accepted a deputy post in Oregon. His wife, Irene, resents having to uproot herself and their children, Shep and Bliss, from their small Illinois town, but Nate insists it's for the best. Once they've moved into their new home, Shep sets off to explore Oregon's outdoors, and things seem to be settling in nicely until one afternoon when Nate returns home to find his 15-year-old son beaten and shot in their kitchen. After Shep dies in Nate's arms, the family seeks vengeance against the young man, Daniel Joseph Robbin, accused of Shep's murder. In the 19 years between Shep's death and Daniel's legal execution, Bliss becomes all but a caretaker for her damaged parents, and a crisis pushes Irene toward the truth about what happened to Shep. Most of the big secret is fairly apparent early on, so it's a testament to Rakha's ability to create wonderfully realized characters that the narrative retains its tension to the end.--Publishers Weekly
A more common name for the "crying tree" is the willow, and one grows near Steven (Shep) Stanley's grave in Blaine, OR. This 15-year-old was killed in his home, and his best friend, Daniel, has been found guilty of the crime and waits a lethal injection on death row. Gifted musician Shep was definitely the center of the world for his mother, Irene, and the intensity of her grief is exquisitely portrayed in this moving, unsentimental tale of loss. After years of severe depression, withdrawal from her family, and alcoholism, Irene comes to realize that if she does not forgive her son's killer she will be destroyed. She secretly writes to Daniel in prison, and they begin corresponding. Then Irene receives written notice of the execution date and knows she must act. VERDICT Gifted storyteller Rakha has crafted a beautiful and passionate novel that never becomes maudlin or unbelievable. All of the characters are genuinely human, and the author even manages to save a few surprising plot details to the end. Highly recommended, especially for readers interested in the subject of loss and coping.- Library Journal
"Rakha writes of one of her central subjects, 'and it wasn't anything she knew how to handle.' Not so for the author, who has crafted not only a compelling read, but one whose message lingers: At what point does that to which we cling for our survival become the very thing that robs us of our life?"–The Oregonian
"The Crying Tree is a powerful novel full of moral questions as well as surprises. Like real life, there are no easy roads for these characters, but they make their way, one step at a time."–Las Vegas Review-Journal
"The Crying Tree is hauntingly beautiful and sad as Rakha examines themes of hate, forgiveness, redemption, acceptance and love. Here, Rakha brings hard questions for which there are no black-and-white answers to the fore. Readers are forced to question their own beliefs as Rakha's characters delve into their own."–Deseret News
"Absorbing and deeply melancholy….Delving into the controversial subjects of capital punishment, forbidden relationships and forgiveness for horrific
acts, [Rakha's] debut novel seems designed to inspire heated debate in book clubs."
–BookPage
"This is a gripping, well-paced tale, compassionate without being mawkish." -The Guardian
Most helpful customer reviews
39 of 40 people found the following review helpful.
Forgive The Unacceptable?
By Opa Wayne
Your son is shot and killed. The killer is on death row. How do you feel?
The Crying Tree is a story of love, grief, hate and forgiveness. It is a novel with intensity and an exceptional plot line. Crying Tree effectively teaches sacred tenets and values because it relates spiritual growth to life's troubles.
Naseem Rakha's book is about the Stanley family: Nate, Irene, Stephen Joseph (called Shep), and Barbara Ann (called Bliss). The Stanley's, who are from southern Illinois, move to Oregon to take a work promotion for Nate. After a year and a half Shep is shot and killed during a robbery. The loss of Shep fractures the family.
Rakha's tale is explicit and dynamic. The story chronicles the grief and struggle of family and friends after the slaying of its most gentle and loving member. This tale is very personal for me, as my son was killed 12 years ago. I have often wondered if anyone could adequately describe the horror, emotions, and physical reaction of losing a beloved child. I believe Naseem accomplishes that task.
Rakha communicates the feelings, the frustration, and desire for vengeance common in family anguish. Rakha describes the physical symptoms and the illness that results from processing an unspeakable loss. Rakha talks of the depression, the sleeplessness, the fear, and the anger that parents endure after losing their son. Naseem relates the denial and rebellion of a sibling living with the loss of a cherished brother.
The emotional path toward healing is a very tough journey that never really ends. Irene, the main character, discovers that a person must fight the inevitable anger and hate that threatens to destroy her soul. Irene admits that the crime is unacceptable and never can be made acceptable, but she must proceed with her life. As she becomes very withdrawn and filled with pain, she learns that she must process her grief and forgive herself and the killer, or die. Following Irene on her journey, we discover some deep spirituality.
The Crying Tree is an exceptional novel. The plot is intriguing and the characters alive and real. I recommend this book.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Would you forgive?
By CathyB
Imagine yourself in the early 1970's. A time when bell bottoms, mini skirts and platform shoes ruled the fashion world. The birth of Aerosmith, Kiss and the Ramones took center stage in the music world. A time of political awakening. Now imagine yourself knowing nothing about this and living in an isolated town in Oregon. You are living what appears to be the American dream - married, two kids (one boy, one girl), etc.... But, then tragedy strikes and what you love most in the world is taken from you. Your only son is brutally murdered in your home.
How do you cope? How do you go on living? What kind of a life do you have? Can there be justice? In The Crying Tree, we are witness to one family's struggle to survive. We share their grief and feel their desperation. We observe as they become bitter and frustrated with one another - they become strangers. There is forgiveness. There are secrets. There are sins of commission and sins of omission. When these are brought to the forefront, we see the unbreakable bonds of family surface.
Ms. Rakha is a wonderful story teller. She was able to hold my attention until the end. I wanted to know how things would work out. The characters were sympathetic including the murderer. This is a tragic novel; however, it is also one of love, forgiveness and redemption. I recommend to those searching for a new voice. A good book for book clubs.
Thank you Shelf Awareness and Random House for this copy.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Timely and well researched.
By Aba Gayle
Several years ago I had a conversation with a woman whose sister had been murdered. She told me that her mother was so depressed and angry about her daughater's murder that she felt that she not only lost her sister but also her mother. Is there a way to heal after such a horrible event?
Naseem tells the story of a mother whose child is murdered. She absolutely gets the mother's feelings accurately. You find yourself living through the depression and horror and unable to adjust to your loss or find peace. We also learn how differently people react to such tragedy and how it affects the dynamics of a family.
There will be some readers who will think that it is not possible for a mother to befriend her child's killer. It is absolutely possible and there are groups of people who have done so. Naseem has carefully researched her novel. She has interviewed such diverse people as Sister Helen Prejean (author of Dead Man Walking), members of Murder Families for Reconciliation and men who have been exonerated and released from death row due to their innocence.
Reading this novel is an emotional and moving experience. I highly recommend The Crying Tree.
Aba Gayle, mother of a murdered daugher.
See all 117 customer reviews...
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