Fans pick 100 books like Our Tree Named Steve

This may be one of the most-read books in our house, which is saying something for a book about a gardening aficionado named Evan, whose dog dies in the first few spreads.

It’s hard for even our 2-year-old not to bristle when Evan, in his grief, violently destroys his beloved garden. But watching how he unintentionally nurtures a once prickly vine into a prized-winning pumpkin has all of us cheering with each read.

I love how this story doesn’t shy away from the deep pain that comes with losing someone we love and doesn’t sugarcoat the long, often lonely process of coming back to the surface for air. Kids are ready for this honesty, and this book does it with a gentle but honest sense of purpose. 

About 9 months after my 3-year-old son sat in the room with us as his uncle quietly passed away, he began having panic attacks about dying. When I took him to a therapist, I realized that I’d done just about everything wrong in how I handled this loss with him. The therapist gave me this book.

The text is simple and focuses on what is important to the child, including what they are seeing in the people around them. Grief is scary to experience, and when you don’t quite understand what’s happening, it’s terrifying to watch your caretakers experience it. This book helps process all of that. I recommend inserting the name of the relative that died into all the places where the text mentions “grandma.”

One of the most frustrating parts of losing someone involves all the well-meaning but ultimately terrible things people say to you. It’s even harder for children who often have to grapple with euphemisms like “passed away” or “in a better place.” This book provides space to feel anger about these phrases and talk about why they don’t make sense. It also broaches feelings of missing, the scary feeling of seeing grownups grieve loudly, and gives little ideas for remembering your loved one, including providing a place in the back to write their name and paste in a picture.

When I picked up Rabbit and the Motorbike, I didn’t know it had a death in it. I grabbed it for the beautiful cover and artwork. But the story inside deeply resonated with me, especially so soon after releasing my own grief book. Rabbit has a friend, Dog, who rides all over on his motorbike and comes back and tells Rabbit all his great adventures. Rabbit never goes anywhere but he loves Dog’s stories. One day, Dog dies and leaves his motorbike to Rabbit. Rabbit is mystified. Why would Dog leave him his motorbike? Rabbit never goes anywhere. But then one day he does, and the whole world opens up and now Rabbit has stories of his own to tell.

A beautiful book about how life goes on after grief and learning to live fully and make our own stories.

I particularly love books that combine the trifecta of engaging story; interesting, complex characters; and good writing with real substance (as in, I stop to think about the content). Greenwood has all of these.

The writing is particularly lyrical—I could fill this space with beautiful quotes. The author takes the reader through four generations of a family, with each generation intimately connected to trees in different ways—from lumbermen to environmental activist to woodcraftsman to botanist.

And as the author “takes a core” through a family tree, the story captures both the characters’ relationships to one another as well as to the world in which they live. I cannot recommend this book enough!

Mitchell is the grandfather of all things tree in Britain and this book is a unique gem that lists most of the nation’s most noteworthy, old, and impressive specimens.

It lit a childhood passion in me for big tree hunting. Growing up in Britain where there are few truly wild forests remaining, it showed me where to look to find the best trees and how to appreciate their size, age, beauty, and importance to all life on earth. 

I admire Ben Rawlence for his immersion in his subject. In previous books he reported from a refugee camp on the Kenya/Somalia border and from strife-ridden eastern Congo.

Here, he roams right across the high north, assessing the gamut of issues confronting a fast-changing north. Not all the change is dire: he quotes Kenneth Høegh, an agronomist, on the novelty of trees.

“Growing up in Greenland, trees were kind of exotic, strange,” as he describes for us Høegh’s project of foresting his island. 

With chapters on the changing forest, animals wild and domestic, the changing climate, and issues and opportunities it presents, The Treeline shows us that planetary change presses forward every bit as much in the high north as down here where most of us live.

This book contains exquisite pencil and ink drawings by Dr. Sarah Simblet who teaches at The Ruskin and Christ Church, at Oxford University. Her observational work is second to none and through it, she explores the relationship between science, history, and art. She is dedicated to sharing visual intelligence and promoting understanding through art.  This is complemented perfectly with the text by Gabriel Hemery who gives an in-depth insight into the value of one of our most treasured assets – the trees of our land.

This book blew me away. I loved how it was told with a range of characters and stories converging into a single whole—like the forest and the trees. I learned more about trees than I ever thought I would care to know and loved every minute of it.

There's nothing more humbling, perhaps, than the vast forests that blanket our planet, and this novel and its unforgettable characters made me feel that in my bones. I'll never look at a tree or planet Earth quite the same way again.

I read Kiernan’s book only recently and found it entrancing. It’s a novel that defies any easy description. In a way, it’s about a grieving writer who takes up residence in an isolated house to try to recover from the death of her partner and to try to start writing again. Nothing more happens except her occasional drives to the local village and walks to the nearby red tree. But the book bursts with richness–with complex storytelling and, we slowly realize, with an increasingly unreliable narrator. As the narrator finds, reads, and transcribes a manuscript of local folklore she found in the house, the novel increasingly blurs the boundaries between past and present, reality and delusion. At times, I found myself unsure of where I was or whose words I was reading. All the stories converge, though, on the red tree, which exerts some force over those that come within… show more.