The Crying Tree - Naseem Rakha

The Crying Tree is the debut novel by Naseem Rakha, an American author and journalist who has managed to combine her experiences reporting from death row, her everyday life in Oregon, and her emotional instincts as a wife and mother, into a beautiful, dramatic and engaging novel. In September 2010, Rakha wrote “I've reported many executions – but the more I see, the less it makes sense”. This novel tries to make sense of the death penalty, despair and revenge by telling the story of the Stanley family; ordinary folk whose lives are blown apart when Shep, their 15 year old son is murdered in ... more

Summary 6th May 1985, Nate Stanley returns to his home in Oregon to find that his fifteen year old son, Shep has been shot during an apparent robbery. Despite trying to revive him, Nate cannot and Shep dies at the scene. 1st October 2004, Superintendent Tab Mason receives notification that, after nineteen years on death row, the man accused of Sheps murder, Daniel Joseph Robbin, will be executed in less than a month. When told the news of his imminent death, Robbin barely acknowledges his fate. Starting his prison sentence at the age of nineteen, he has spent most of his life in prison and is ... more

I was intrigued by the jacked description of this book although to be fair it wasn’t the happiest synopsis of a book I have read recently. This is Naseem Rakha’s debut novel and was released back in July 2009. Irene Stanley lives in Illinois with her husband Nate and her two children Shep and Bliss. Irene is very content with her life and likes things just the way they are. Her husband Nate is a police officer and her two children are thriving with school and their friends. Nate decides that it’s time to up-sticks and makes the move to Oregon which proves to be unpopular with both the kids and ... more

I have just finished reading The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha and I have to say that I thought it was an exceptional novel and one that I cannot recommend highly enough. It is an easy read (I read it in one six hour sitting!), but yet it is rich in both language and content in a way that many books try to be, but fail. The story spans 21 years, from 1984 to 2004 and follows the lives of Irene, Nate and Bliss Stanley and how their lives are changed forever by the actions of Daniel Robbin. On the first page of the novel, you find out that Daniel Robbin is a convicted murderer on death row ... more