Book #21: The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo

I read about this book somewhere on someone's book blog and it got a very high rating from them and so I requested it. I read it right after Ella Minnow Pea and it had all of the qualities that I didn't find in that book--full characters and relationships that seemed and felt actually meaningful. The book is about five generations of women in an extraordinarily long-lived family and their complicated relationships after a lifetime (or several lifetimes) of living together and keeping secrets from each other. These women weren't perfect and didn't always love each other--they felt very real and human.

Anna, the matriarch, is 112 when the book opens, and is almost the oldest person in the world but is incredibly active and healthy still. Her daughter, Bets, is in her 90s, and her daughter Callie is in her 60s, and her daughter Deb is in her 40s, and her daughter Erin is in her 20s and pregnant at the beginning of the novel. They live in their family home in Kidron, California, in the central valley, on the olive groves that Anna's father planted when they moved here from Australia. As the book opens, a geneticist comes to study their blood and do research on how they're so long-lived and healthy, and his coming spurs a lot of nervousness and fear among the women about the secrets they've kept from each other for so long. I really liked how I started reading this book and you keep learning these pretty huge, explosive secrets about the women and their families as the book goes on, but you don't learn them with a big bang or a big reveal like many books do. They just come out naturally, when you're in the mind of one of the characters themselves, and many of the secrets never actually get resolved or come to light at all.

It was amazing to read about how long people can hold onto bitterness or sadness too--and that also seemed very real. It sounds dumb, but sometimes I think of older people as though they have to be perfect, or that they've worked through all their issues by the time they're that old. But nope, they're just people and they aren't perfect and they still get into fights and have century-old issues with their mother or daughter. But even with all those issues, they're still a family and they still love each other and want to pass on their legacies to the coming generations. But not everything gets resolved by the end and you don't really find out what happened to everyone. That's life.