Title: The Green Apple Tree
Author: Gene Fackler
Publisher: The Wave Media Solutions
ISBN: 9781998394951
Pages: 310
Genre: Fiction / Mystery / Suspense / Coming-of-Age
Reviewer: Anthony Avina
Hollywood Book Reviews
A person’s teenage years are some of the most formative and telling of their lives. The events that drive those formative years can have lasting impacts for the remainder of their lives, be they good or bad events. From the friendships a teenager makes to the mistakes which define them and the lessons that can be learned from those mistakes, how a person responds to these events can be the difference between a life fulfilled and a life lived hard.
In author Gene Fackler’s The Green Apple Tree, the author explores the lives of three young boys in 1960s Texas. When two of the boys decades later reunite in the aftermath of a funeral, they begin to find themselves transported back to the events of one fateful summer which shattered the age of innocence they had enjoyed up to that point, and as one of them disappeared, the other two found themselves haunted by those events and the secrets that threaten to press in on them in the present day.
The author brings a slow-burn style of prose in the best way possible. The transportive nature of the author’s writing style makes the Texas setting feel both gritty and visceral on the pages, and the author gives just enough detail to create a general idea of the world around these characters while allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks speaks to a memory-driven quality to the narrative style overall, as this coming of age tale is more of a memory of the protagonist than a YA-style present day story. The imagery in the writing style also felt very cinematic, often freeing my mind to go to an indie drama film setting while feeling the wildness of youth and the emotional toll which comes with shattered childhoods as the story progresses.
Anyone who enjoys fictional narratives that delve into mystery, suspense, and thriller genres and incorporate a coming-of-age style of storytelling will thoroughly be enthralled by this story. The novel is very character driven, with the past and present colliding in an emotional way that explores the social development of these three boys before and after being confronted by this sudden and shocking series of events. The amount of backstory the author gives to the characters, including protagonist Thomas, from the boy’s fascination with explosives to Thomas’s childhood exploring Germany in the aftermath of WWII and his relationship with his father, aka the General, made this a compelling novel that readers can easily get lost in.
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