As a kid, I loved Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books, and this series always seemed especially magical. I just reread Below the Root, and I still kinda wish I could live in a giant tree and weave myself a sleeping place from living vines. Now I want to read books two and three (and learn how to weave a sleeping place somehow).

For the first half of this book, I would have called it "hippie dystopia." The "Make Love Not War" message came on a bit too strong at times (Did she really need to mention the need for temporary sterility in the youth halls? And does "close communion" mean what I think it means?), but like most dystopian societies (and cults) the happy world of Green Sky is not as joyful as it seems.

Like many others I played the video game (on my grandmother's Apple II) and love the treetop world of Green Sky. I was around 8 years old when I found the novel on the shelf of the library, and I eagerly checked it out to have another chance to explore the world I loved from the game. Unfortunately, I never made it past the first chapter. The book went back to the library unread. As an 8-year-old girl, I always played as Pomma and spent hours exploring the branches of the trees more than following the quest. The book took too long to get to its descriptions of Green Sky, and I was too young to understand Raamo's angst.

Twenty-five years later I picked up the novel once more. This time it was a return to the world I'd loved as a child, and as the story unfolded my favorite game began to make more sense.

Considering the book from a less sentimental perspective, with the popularity of YA dystopia, it suddenly seems almost contemporary. The writing style is slightly dated as the children's and YA mediums have matured in the last few decades. Judging by my 8-year-old reaction, this book would have made a better YA novel than a children's book, and could have benefited from a bit more description and fleshing out of the details. However, I feel like it would still make a good dystopian book for anyone who felt that current YA selections are a bit too graphic for younger readers.

The ending is not much of an ending and seems more like a milestone in a longer novel, so I suppose I will have to pick up the next two to finish the story. And I have to admit that I look forward to returning to Green Sky a few more times.

Nice story, but the similar-but-not-the-same words for things got a bit annoying. World building reminded me of Thirteenth Child

It was too confusing st first, so much going on as the author created an entirely different society. But once I understood what was what, I liked the story and plan to Read the rest of the trilogy

2022: I reread this again because I remember it being a clear allegory for made-up discrimination and demonizing of another and I wanted to remind myself of the story line. I absorbed it in just two days because I had a big chunk of travel, but i was also engaged in making those connections between this old fantasy story and our modern world today. Unlike when I reread it in 2011, I plan to read the full trilogy to follow the conflicts to the end. If I remember correctly, it mostly ends happily and I need that optimism in my life right now.

2011: I recently reread this after having read it in junior high. I'd played the Windham Classics game on my C64 often and enjoyed how the game picked up the story's feel without entirely duplicating the plot.

My revisit was not disappointing. Snyder creates an excellent utopia in this novel, which is just beginning to unravel at the end of the novel. I like the characters, even the ones of questionable motives, because they're all vulnerable in some ways. Green-Sky is a place I'd like to live, even though I see its faults, too. Can't wait to reread the other two books in the series.

I remember reading this when it first came out. I loved it--my teachers hated it. I really wanted to do a book report presentation on it in speech class, and my teacher really, really didn't want me to--I remember she kept interrupting and criticising to the place I was ready to just quit talking and sit down. At the time I thought it was me; now I think maybe it was the book.

Reading it now at over 50, I can see where the off-the-grid vegetarian Utopian society thing would have upset that particular teacher, in our small rural Midwestern conformist town. I can also see the reason for my own fascination with the story, given that my parents were members of an American pseudo christian cult that emphasised "spiritual ministry" to the place that if you hadn't had a marvellous "experience" you tried to make one happen, or pretend it had. "Healing" was a huge deal in my own family, which might explain my fascination with the character of Raamo, the young boy who wants to be a healer but finds himself forced into another ministry in the Greensky community. He's pleased to be Chosen, but wonders why he can't do what he's good at.

The Snyder Houserules for a Utopian Society
1. Hide your real thoughts and emotions from others at all times, particularly if you are a "spiritual leader".
2. Practice self-hypnosis with song and meditation.
3. Drug the emotions you can't control by ingesting mildly hallucinogenic fruits, which are addictive (of course) and cause "wasting".
4. Live in denial of anything wrong in your world. Avoid anything unpleasant; sing and dance it away, and remind yourself how lucky you are to be safe.
5. Fill your days with imposed rituals to create false "positive" emotions to replace the ones you're hiding.
6. When you realise you don't have a "gift", practice "illusion" (deception) to cover your personal failings. But feel disgraced, because you are! To respond to this negative emotion, see 1-5.

Don't you just wanna go live there? *sarcasm* Looking back it didn't surprise me to discover that the author was California born and bred; this is the quintessential seventies counterculture sludge that gave birth to the "New Age" (sameold Age of Aquarius) of the eighties and nineties. No wonder my teacher hated it. Snyder's fantasy world uses words that are obvious linguistic borrowings from European languages, particularly Germanic ones: the Kindar, the Erdlings, Grundbaum--though there are some French ones as well: "pensing" (a form of mindreading) and "lapans" (little fuzzy bunny-type animals). Then there's "Raamo" himself--a little branch (from the Spanish, ramo) of the old Tree. Snyder also uses the pompous invented vocabulary so dear to the hearts of a certain type of 1970s off-gridder, calling meals "food-taking", etc. How well I remember "nutrition breaks" instead of "snacks"!

As books go, I think I see where the beginning of the series behemoth for YA novels began. This is the first of a trilogy, and gave me the impression that perhaps the author wrote all three tomes as one, and realised or was told that YA readers of the time wouldn't read a book 600+ pages long, so it was split up. That might explain why the end of this volume is simply chopped off in mid-conversation--which annoyed me then, and annoyed me even more now. It's cheating. I found myself skimming through the last chapter, hoping to get to the chase--and there wasn't one. As a kid I devoured Snyder's books, and enjoyed them. This one is not up to her usual standard of writing. Though I've shelved it under "children" I'm not sure it's really for her usual target audience, even though the protagonists are age 14.

The modern edition contains some strange typos, particularly "illusive" (unreal, creating an illusion) instead of "elusive" (quickly disappearing or escaping) which was the word called for by the context.

I will probably read the other two, just to find out what happened. I remember reading part, or possibly all, of vol 2, but I think vol 3 was unavailable to me at the time.

I picked this book up at a used book store my parents took me to as a kid. I read it multiple times before I ever found the sequels.

Green Sky was probably one of the first fantasy worlds that I ever really became engaged with.

I'm assuming the target audience for this book is the 10 to 13 year olds but it is good enough to be enjoyed by adults.

I hate to call it sweet, but for a large part that is exactly what it was. Raamo and his people live a peaceful, joyous life in the trees and a lot of the book was the descriptions of this life. It wasn't until we were a fair bit into it that we learned that all wasn't as it seemed with this peaceful existence.

This can't really be read as a stand alone - the story just basically stops at a crucial point and you are left wondering what just happened. I checked on the next two installments and figured out that the first is from the viewpoint of the tree-people, the second is from the viewpoint of the people who live underground, and the third is where it all comes together and we finally have a resolution.

I would recommend it to people who enjoy books like The City of Ember, The Giver or The Knife of Never Letting Go.

This is a young adult novel with a unique setting, an interesting premise, an unexpected blending of genre, and a severe pacing problem.

It would seem that the Green Sky trilogy began life as a much bigger work, split into chunks down the line, and it shows. I'd have a hard time picturing younger folks being able to sit through this, for a variety of reasons. I think there's an excellent story fighting its way out, so I'll run down some of its finer points--which tend to be a double-edged sword:

The setting's use of "Pensing", signature shuba gliders, and non-violent communal concepts are colorful, but come at the cost of flat characters. They really do seem as though they need another book or two to level out. That said, Raamo's inciting conflict--of being forced into an unwanted "chosen" position instead of what he likes and is good at--is an intriguing prospect that helps push the story forward. As for the rest, I really couldn't tell you.

The plot itself is actually not bad on paper, being more about sleuthing and unraveling a conspiracy than about wisecracking or action. The issue is, given the premise (the characters exist in a society where they literally don't know the meaning of "war"), there is very little tangible conflict over the book. Without some kind of 'tilt' the story begins to drag before long. There is an excellent standoff near the book's finale, which uses these concepts (pensing, war, etc.) together in a memorable fashion: in effect, a standoff minus the standoff. It's really something, and for me made the book worth a look.

The pensing dynamic, pastoral community, and even the forested world give this a strong hippie vibe, and that's probably no accident. I didn't find it off-putting, but I wouldn't call it subtle.

All in all, there is minimal activity in the book, and it's surprisingly long for how little it provides. In the younger crowd, I could see its inventions stirring the imagination, but I could also see its shonky pace as a serious test of patience.

[Add one star if you are under the age of 14]

"Below the Root" is not quite as enjoyable as an adult as it was as a child, but it still holds your interest despite what I found to be a rather high level of exposition. If the characters are a bit two-dimensional, the sort of hippiearchy that rules Green Sky is interesting, and of course everything is very clearly a prelude to the next books in the series.

Loved this trilogy...

I read this trilogy long after I was out of the target age group, but I enjoyed it greatly. (I'd read some of her other books as a kid.) Part of this was nostalgia, as I'd played the computer game on my Commodore 64 many years ago.

The game was unusual in that it was a direct sequel to the books, with Snyder directly involved.