Walking the Tree is the second novel by Australian writer Kaaron Warren. It is a Science Fiction story, telling the tale of Lillah, a young woman living on an island called Botanica. Botanica is largely taken up by a massive tree, and there are tribes of people settled around different parts of the island’s shore. Lillah is from the Order of Ombu, and along with other chosen young women, she sets out on a journey to find a mate from another tribe. They take some children along with them, so they can learn about the different ways around the island.

Before Lillah leaves, she is told by a dying mother that her son Morace, one of the children going with her, is her half-brother and he might be carrying the deadly spikes disease. She is asked to look after him and not reveal his secret. So Lillah, despite of being very rule abiding, risks all of the people’s lives on the island to hide Morace’s secret and they set out walking to the nearest village.

From then on, nothing much happens. This journey from each village to the next uneventfully drags on for 386 pages, dipping in and out of Mills and Boon territory, until finally a bit of excitement is thrown into the story when Lillah is told by a disfigured woman that people from Morace’s mother’s village have discovered he is carrying spikes and they are coming to purify him. Lillah is warned she must run and enter the ghost caves inside the tree, or she and everyone she has been in contact with will be killed. Unbelievably, from here on until the end of the novel, what pace there was disappears.

Walking the Tree simply trundles along in first gear without really going anywhere. The characters are dull and almost indistinguishable from each other. The protagonist, Lillah, is irritating and unlikable, which makes it much harder for the reader to invest in the story. There are also far too many characters that serve no purpose. Phyto, for example, is one in a long list of weak and instantly forgettable characters that the story can easily do without.

There was so much potential with this story – a mythical tree island, that is cut off from the rest of the world, where there are ghosts that live inside the tree, keeping the islanders from venturing inland, and there is a sea monster that stops them from venturing too far into the water. It is perhaps unfortunate for Warren that Lost raised the bar in terms of modern mysterious island stories, and makes everything that is lacking from hers seem more apparent.

Warren does have some good inventive language in Walking the Tree. A good example of this is moss-muncher, which is a derogatory name that women on the island call each other, being used as another word for a liar. Spikes is another example and is an excellent name for a disease that has wiped out their ancestors. However, it is not enough to generate an interest in a flat story. Warren provides no surprises; every idea explored in the novel is predictable. For example, the ghosts inside the tree are simply people just like them who don’t get any sunlight.

It might just be second book syndrome, and Warren’s first novel Slights was brilliant. From reading this one, it is very doubtful. There is not one beautiful sentence in the whole novel, and her descriptions of everything in her world lack in expression.

It is an Angry Robot novel, and it will make you angry that you have wasted your time reading it. Walking the Tree is a good idea for a novel, but it has been badly written. It seems like Warren had a good idea but had no idea what to do with it.

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