
After being discharged he wanders across America, realizing as he does so that deforestation is ruining the country. He falls from his plane and is saved by a banyan tree.
Douglas Pavlicek – “an orphan who enlists in the Stanford prison experiment before enlisting in the Air Force. Dorothy Cazaly – “an unconventional stenographer who falls in love with nature late in life.”. Ray Brinkman – “a conventional intellectual property lawyer and Dorothy’s husband who later in life falls in love with nature.”. His father planted a tree before the birth of Adam and each of his four siblings as a child, Adam conflated the characteristics of each tree with his siblings.” Adam Appich – “an inquisitive boy who is fascinated with insects and later becomes interested in human psychology and how humans can only understand things that are put into narratives. Mimi falls in love with the Mulberry bush he plants in their backyard and is deeply affected when her father eventually commits suicide.” Mimi Ma – “the eldest daughter of Winston Ma, born Ma Sih Hsuin, who fled China and became an engineer in America. Nicholas Hoel – “an artist of Norwegian and Irish descent who comes from a long line of farmers and whose great-great-great-grandfather planted a chestnut tree that survived blight for decades and enthralled the Hoel family for generations.”. Here are brief descriptions of each of them:
The characters in The Overstory are Nicholas Hoel, Mimi Ma, Adam Appich, Ray Brinkman, Dorothy Cazaly, Douglas Pavlicek, Neelay Mehta, Patricia Westerford, and Olivia Vandergriff, each of them different and with unique stories and lifepaths. The novel is about five trees whose unique life experiences with nine very different people bring them together to address the destruction of forests. Netflix’s The Overstory is based on the Pulitzer-winning novel by author Richard Powers, published in 2018. Richard Powers, author of The Overstory novel