"[Some slightly spoiler-ish material is included in the review - proceed at your own risk!]

3.5, rounded down.

Although I had read Everett's last book (So Much Blue) and really enjoyed that, what impelled me to read this was all the hoopla over the 'gimmick' of publishing three SLIGHTLY different editions, which sounded interesting and unique - until I realized that unless I was going to track down the OTHER two versions and do a line by line comparison (something I wasn't sufficiently invested to do) - the two additional versions were totally superfluous to my singular reading experience.

As with Blue, this also has a somewhat tripartite structure - one thread of the story follows Zach Wells' travails as a college teacher of geology, with a student's crush on him and a colleague's push for tenure taking precedence. Strand two involves his daughter Sarah, who gets diagnosed with the rare and fatal Batten's disease, and how her deterioration affects his shaky marriage. The major portion of this storyline involves a trip to Paris before Sarah's disease progresses too far. The final and central thread finds Zach becoming increasingly obsessed with a small group of Mexican women he suspects have been kidnapped and forced into slave labor in New Mexico. Although each strand is intriguing in its own right, I didn't think they intersected well, or in any really meaningful way.

Although Everett's prose stylings are terrific, a couple of things bugged me - primarily the interjection of odd fragments throughout which seemed to be unnecessary filler: some of these are chess moves denoting his games with Sarah, some random Latin phrases, some factoids about fossils. Alongside the Latin, there are also a sprinkling of German and French phrases, and the final section contains a lot of untranslated Spanish - necessitating frequent trips to Google Translator, which always annoys me.

The ending also seemed a bit rushed and inconclusive (perhaps this is NOT true in the other two versions, but I read the Kindle one, which seems to be the most widely available version). And I hadn't a clue what the title meant - yes, there are phones used intermittently, but they didn't seem to take a meaningful role - until I read the NYT reveal of the three versions, and that it refers to the children's game, where facts become distorted the further they get from the originator.

One thing that DID fascinate me is that Wells and his family are not revealed to be black until a third of the way in; although knowing Everett is himself black and usually writes about race, I assumed that to be so - but it didn't seem to really 'matter' - until the final page. Ultimately, it was an interesting experiment, but I was left a mite underwhelmed."

"A college professor copes with the illness of his daughter by trying to save the person who sent him a cryptic note. As usual for this author, the book was well written. The parts of the book with his daughter were heart breaking. However, there were too many writerly flourishes, like the repetition of phrases and the non-ending. It felt like he was trying too hard to impress a writer’s workshop. I’ve had a mixed reaction to his books, but I will keep reading them. I definitely recommend “The Trees�. 3.5 stars"