The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara is a deeply disturbing novel about what happens when western culture collides with an isolated culture on a remote Micronesian island. Most disturbing is that it is very loosely based on a true story.
I had no sympathy for the narrator, Dr. Norton Perina who visits the island and finds that people seem to live for greatly extended lives by ingesting the meat of a rare turtle.
Yanagihara presents the reader with many moral and ethical questions throughout this long and tedious confession by Perina. By the end, I was so tired of this book I could barely finish it, and in fact I wish I hadn't. An exhausting read.
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