| Title | : | Below the Root |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0595370314 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780595370313 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 231 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1975 |
Below the Root Reviews
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a little bird, a little boy, flitting through the trees; thrust upon him is a mantle of authority. to flit no more! roles taken to provide meaning, shelter, a shield: the world of Green Sky. denizens: beware of what lies below the root: there be dragons! or knowledge. or the past, a history buried. or an underclass, perhaps, striving to meet the sky!
a children's classic, of sorts. first published in 1975. shades of The Giver. a simple tale of friendship and growing up. a complex tale of myths and lies and mysteries upon mysteries. an introduction to revolution, for the little ones.
gossamer prose; steely ideas. oh what a tangled web adults may weave!
I tried describing the book to friends. their reactions were predictable. like so:
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This is the first book in The Greensky trilogy that just absolutely made my mind soar as a child and can still touch my heart as an adult.
A group of people inhabit the tree tops called Kindar. They are vegetarians and float from branch to branch using glider packs called Shubas. Some are gifted with powers. The power of teleportation and telekenesis (called kiniport in the books), the power to make trees grow (called grunsprek), and the power to read minds (called pensing). These children are ushered into a special school who are a part of a religious cult, the sole purpose of whom are to keep the Kindar safe from the evil creatures lurking beneath the ground, the Erdlings. A young acolyte questions his orders and finds his world turned upside down when he realizes the Erdlings are not the monsters he's been led to believe.
A story about religion and politics and social standing where children need to question their elders and question the rules that guide their society. A wonderful read that can open minds and teach that absolute obedience is not always a good thing. -
This was the first book I ever checked out of the Library. I picked it up purely for the cover, and fell deeply in love with it. A couple of years later I got the Windham Classics video game as a birthday gift, and fell in love with the world all over again, but I came to it already loving the world of Green-Sky.
[Review contains minor to significant spoilers!]
Some people reviewing this book and its sequels recently have criticized their originality and called out their trope of human colonists living a low tech and agrarian lifestyle built on social views popular in the sixties and seventies, who discover the same cultural issues led them to leave earth in the first place and must confront the true origins and technology of their historical founders. Ground that has been covered by Anne McCaffrey, Larry Niven, and others from books to cartoons to Star Trek episodes over the last few decades. Let's be clear here, these books were written in the early 70s and were trope-building. This is where some of those ideas came from.
Children's Literature is often earnest and slightly obvious in it's themes, and that is appropriate for books aimed at developing intellects. It seems odd to criticize a book for not having a level of character or thematic complexity that would be discouraging to its target audience.
The world-building here is first rate. The characters are well drawn within the confines of the world they inhabit, and the storytelling mechanism was original (or at least unusual) for its time.
This is a book (and a series) about social themes, personal responsibility, and taking on the mantle of responsibility for ourselves and the society we are a part of as we grow up. The characters begin with simplistic views about good and bad, right and wrong, and what it means to obey they rules.
Watching the characters discover the realities of oppression, deception by government for the perpetuation of government, and the complicity of those who are ruled accepting negative things happening to others for the sake of the status quo was astounding as an eight-year-old. These are heady concepts, and they were handled deftly at the intellect level of children.
The issues faced by the characters defy simple fixes, and have lasting consequences for themselves and the people that they care about. Lessons about moral and ethical choices, loyalty to friends and societies (and the conflicts between those things), and what happens AFTER we do the "right" thing and who it affects are all lasting lessons that I'm very glad to have discovered in these books.
I can't really recommend Below the Root and its sequels highly enough, and I hope that these classics of children's literature return to print and library shelves. They are timeless, and as a parent of children in the target age group, I haven't found anything better to introduce to my kids. -
I fell in love with the world of Green Sky when I was only 3 years old. Sounds preposterous, but it's true. I sat watching my dad play the Commodore game by Windham Classics for hours, and hours. By the time I was 4-5 I could beat it myself by memory - but I always would call him at work if I forgot how to load the game (Load "*", 8, 1) hahaha.
When I was old enough, my mom told me the game was based on a trilogy - and so it began.
These will always be my favorite books, period. It even beat out Alice in Wonderland which was my favorite until I finished Below the Root. I didn't even have to finish the other two - I had already found the books that captured my heart.
Neat little fact I became of aware of years later - in the game you can actually hurt people with weapons. I had never tried, and I still haven't. Something I'm proud of to this day. In a letter I received from Zilpha Keatley Snyder, she said she was happy to have created a game where the goal of completion involved no killing.
Even my alias of over 15 years reflects my love of these books =) I was kindarsky on AOL - until the username character limit was increased and I became kindarspirit forever after. People in real life actually call me kindar which is weird, but I am very used to it now ;) -
Rereading a beloved childhood favorite as an adult is always risky.
I read Below the Root by Zilpha Keatley Snyder and its sequels over and over and over again as a voracious young SF lover in the early 80’s (and surprisingly was oblivious to the computer game based on the same world). At the time, I was fascinated by the ability of Raamo to read minds, or at least emotions, and swept along by the idea of gliding through the treetops. I was totally immersed in the immediate events and not too concerned by the larger moralizing of the story.
Re-reading as an adult, I keep being struck by the parallels to The Giver.
> The attempt to create a utopia free of violence and pain
> A small group of privileged elites who know the secret
> That these elites commit violence to maintain the innocence of the masses
> The protagonist being chosen to join the elite
Now these items are very common in utopia/dystopia stories, but the similarity is easy to find.
When reading as a child, the many made up words used to create the foreign world of Green Sky, pense instead of telepathy, nid for home-place bower, Ol-zhaan for the priest class, just were accepted without thought. Reading as an adult, the way the wonderfully detailed world is described feels a bit dated and I wasn’t sure that the made-up words added value. Reading as a child, I was also oblivious to certain other details that just jumped out at me this time around, such as the specifics of the special medicine taken the youth halls and what exactly was alluded to by people sharing “close communion.”
Reading today, the minimal character development is grating to my adult eyes. It’s hard to decide if it is intentional because Ms. Snyder was writing for a younger audience or if the much shorter book length in 1975 just didn’t allow the space for the complex internal dialog that we have become accustomed to. But despite the flaws that my adult eyes see, I wish that Below the Root is better known and more widely read.
My memory is that I always preferred the middle book in the trilogy And All Between best. I do intend to continue re-reading to see if that holds, since I was able to pick up all 3 volumes as free ebooks during a big “sale” last year. -
Two stars, which is generous. (Strange, because I remember liking The Egypt Game; Snyder missed the mark here, though, badly.) Despite presenting the reader with an interesting world and some potentially fascinating philosophical questions, this book was SO BORING until the last forty pages, in which everything happens. Beyond the major pacing problems, there was the classic issue of telling-not-showing. I had buckets full of unnecessary background information dumped over me like cold water every three pages, which threw me right out of the narrative. I don't know about you, but when my mom reminds me to "remember the Golden Rule," I don't respond with "yes, mother, you're right" followed by a three-page treatise about the history of kindergarten education in my society.
This book is clearly intended as a coming of age story about a young person (Raamo) who is selected to join an elite group of decision-makers (Ol-zhaan) and learns terrible secrets about the world in which he lives (secret subjugation of free thinkers). There are many notable books in this subgenre written for the same age group that I would recommend instead (The Giver or Zahrah the Windseeker).
Whatever Snyder's intentions, Below the Root reads like a hand-wringing morality play about the dangers of groupthink and standardized tests and how power corrupts. And for a book of only 175 pages, it drags on forever. -
The Zilpha Keatly Snyder went up the waterspout....
Just had to get that out of my system
Bought Below the Root and And All Between for Madison from the used bookshop in Napanee over Christmas, and reread them both while I was there. Wish they'd had Until the Celebration; the trilogy needs an ending.
I can't have been much older than Madison when I read them last. 20 years ago? I remembered them vividly. I was a little surprised to find out that they read very much like my memories of them. Often when I reread childhood favourites I find that my imagination filled in details that I remember as if I'd read them, but can't find within the printed pages. Like, well, I can't find an example, but I know it has happened, books that seem so _thin_ on reread.
But these were very like. Only my perspectives had changed.
An interesting comparison with Pamela Dean's Dubious Hills; both are about societies restructured by some long-ago cabal in an attempt to eliminate the potential for violence. There's an unusual theme.. -
As a child, this was one of my favorite books. I checked it out several times from the library and knew exactly where it was on the shelf. It's been many years but I still remember the story and think of it when I'm laying in filtered sunshine wondering what it would be like to only get sunshine "below the root".
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11/16/19 on sale for $1.99 for Kindle.
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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've wanted to read this book for awhile because I had played (but never got very in) the
intriguing 8-bit computer game that's based on it. Sadly, seems even just bungling around in that game was a better experience than reading its source material.
The world Synder sets up is interesting enough - a science fantasy dealing with a society that lives in giant trees (think somewhere between Ewok and Elvish sophistication of arboreal house-making and living), a society split into the Kindar who glide from tree to tree using worn 'shuba' wings, and the holy Ol-zhaan who rule over them, both of whom possess varying degrees of 'Spirit' powers - telekinetic and telepathic abilities, and then there's the forbidden forest floor, where the monstrous Pash-shan live. Of course, there's secrets behind this societal set-up that our young protagonist must inevitably uncover.
But the book is constantly undone by *so* much telling instead of showing - it could almost be used as a textbook case of this. Countless infodumps from the characters and the narrator, especially at every major plot turn, that undo any spell the book could have cast.
I am still going to retry the game via emulator, though, to see if it retains any of its magic. -
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. -
Read it when I was 13 or so (I think this was the first "serious" book I have read in the English language), then re-read it five years later and found that it did not lose any of its magic. It is about people who live in tree tops on a planet with low gravity and giant trees, with houses and other buildings on the branches. It is a utopian (or rather dystopian?) society led by clerics, where violence and anger is unheard of, more or less as a result of indoctrination.
There are stories of fearsome monsters who allegedly inhabit the forest floor, and people are forbidden even to look at the ground. In the end a young and curious boy discovers that the forest floor is inhabited not by monsters, but by people alike them, cast out and banished from their society - and he ends up questioning all he has been taught. -
Leave it to The Amazing Zilpha to create a fantasy world so unique and unfamiliar, yet so engaging! The worldbuilding of Green-Sky never overwhelms the story, but instead is deftly woven into it. It can't be easy to construct a believable high fantasy setting without slowing the plot to a crawl, but ZKS somehow did it.
The arboreal world of the Kindar has so many clever details that never would have occurred to me. Fire isn't used because it naturally does not mix well with wood and leaves, and metal is alien to the Kindar because they have no stone from which to extract ore. It is implied that . This makes it pretty fun to look for other clues. One thing I noticed was a lot of names that were very similar to various nature-related words. Here is my list so far:
Raamo: "rama" is Spanish for "branch"
Valdo: "wald"(pronounced "vald") is German for "forest"
Pomma: "pomme", French for "apple"
Hearba: "hierba", Spanish for "grass"
Baya: Spanish for "berry"
Orbora: sounds like arbor or arboreal
Ciela: "cielo" is Spanish for "sky"
Haba: Spanish for "bean"
I did guess the main plot twist quite early on, but it is still a good twist in spite of that, so I have no complaints on that point. And there will doubtless be more surprises(good and bad alike) in the rest of the trilogy! -
I liked the idea for this book, but unfortunately there's too much telling the reader and not enough showing. This meant I never really felt involved in the book - the whole way through it felt like the start of a book where authors often info dump worldbuilding information. This wasn't helped by the fact that that not much happens until halfway through the book. Things suddenly pick up and then you've hit the end, just when it feels like it's got underway.
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the writyng style is really excellent, very good and awesome.
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I had never heard of this book or this series or even this author until a good friend of mine mentioned doing her zillionth re-read of this beloved piece of her childhood. Since of course I needed to understand her book love, she loaned me this first volume and I settled in for a discovery.
I despaired, at first, because it took me a while to get into this. Snyder makes no apologies about her world-building, which is great in the sense that it's very solid and detailed world-building and frustrating in the sense that it took me a minute to figure out what kind of world was actually being built. I also found the characters rather flat at the beginning as they are assembled to create the main set-up necessary for the plot.
But then the plot kicks in with a vengeance, and from there I was very interested indeed. I'm glad I stuck with it, because this is a great story of the perils of hiding from fear and the unknown; it's not so much that the plot twists are surprising (although the reality of who the Kindar came from definitely was) because the main plot separation has been used several times since the publication of this. But the imagination and somewhat ethereal nature of this story draw you in almost without you realizing it. It ends up being a bit of a mash-up of "Demolition Man," "Fern Gully," and "Planet of the Apes," except I think it predates all of those (maybe not "Planet").
Thing, though: be sure to have the second book nearby for when you finish this. That cliffhanger is fierce. -
This is a really great book. I had always wanted to read it and then once I started listening to The Story of Simon Simopath by the UK band Nirvana and the album reminded me of this book, so I picked it back up after putting it down for years. Truly a great, whimsical read.
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I enjoyed this beautiful world and these interesting characters :)
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I was disappointed in this series because it wasn't what I expected from reading The Changeling by the same author. It The Changeling is set in contemporary (~1970) California in the real world, but Ivy and Martha play imagination games about the heroine Princess Wisteria and the usurper Queen Oleander in the Land of Green Sky, a planet whose gravity is so light people can wear special garments and glide like flying squirrels. This trilogy that starts with Below the Root is called Green Sky and it IS set on that planet, but there are no queens nor princesses. Despite my disappointment, it's still worth reading.
The society that does live in the Land of Green Sky features implausibly well-functioning socialism (though not labelled as such), considers violence so horrible there are no (polite) words for it, and uses rituals to keep people focused on Peace, Joy, and Love. They are ovovegetarians and allow free love for the young (and the priestly class, oddly.) There are also gifts of the Spirit (not to be confused with Christian meanings of that phrase) like reading each other's thoughts and telekinesis, though these gifts seem to be fading away from the population. Some people chew a soothing berry if they aren't able to feel Peace. The leaders prescribe a young person's career and no one seems to complain about it.
So what's wrong with this utopia? Only that the ruling priests lie to the people about both the past and the present - in order to protect them. Those who persistently ask too many questions or find out things they aren't supposed to know are apt to vanish. These disappearances are blamed on the monstrous Pash-shan who live below the magical Root of the Wissenvine which contains them in underground dens. It's not quite clear whether they eat the vanished ones or enslave them.
The story focuses on three young people newly appointed to the priesthood and their unsettling discoveries, and on a child found on the forest, apparently escaped from the Pash-shan.
Although this is the first of a trilogy it ends reasonably well, in a victory for truth, though it seems fragile to me.
Note that this book and its sequels are clean, except for a brief and very vague mention in this one of shifting love affairs in the co-ed youth halls (where the young people are fed contraceptives daily). This would probably go right over the heads of most young kids. We don't hear about any specific love affairs - there's not even any kissing. Most people past their mid 20s seem to be in monogamous pair bonds. -
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. -
Cross-posted from my blog where there's more information on where I got my copy and links and everything.
This was freaking weird. But that’s probably most likely a me thing more than anything. This kind of science fiction is just not really my thing and this one didn’t do much to sway me that way. However, I did research into this as well, and it was quite popular. There was even a video game made based on these which was apparently pretty good and somewhat unique in its features at the time.
And it has also been re-released on Kindle in 2012, which is probably really great for anyone who loved the books as a kid and wants to re-read them or just have them in their collection. They have cool covers, and they’re only about 6 dollars which is probably what you’d spend buying a used copy unless you happened to find one specifically.
This is just really a me thing. This has a bit of a Giver or Chrysalids vibe, and I totally get people liking these, remembering them fondly, and even liking them now, but I just wasn’t into it. I’ve enjoyed a lot of books from Snyder, and I would totally read more as an adult, but this one’s not just for me. I’m not even going to rate it, because it’s so much a “not for me” book that it wouldn’t be fair.
Don’t let my opinion stop you if you think this sounds interesting. I’m gonna pass this one along and hope it finds a home with someone who likes this genre a bit more. -
My older sister and I used to play an eerily enchanting video game on the Commodore 64 in the mid-80s called Below the Root. I think I mostly watched my sister play because she knew what she was doing and I was a bit young for it. The game had such a unique aesthetic (characters gliding through a forest of enormous trees) and it generated such strange feelings in me that it has stayed with me through the years. I noticed this book cover in a used bookstore recently and was surprised to find that this strange game was based on a 1975 Lois Lowry-esque book. I ended up enjoying the book though it wasn't super compelling.
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I probably would have loved this as a kid, since I was a big fantasy fan, and the weirder the better. But now I’m less impressed by made-up words (“food-taking” instead of meals? Really?) and strange names, and I’m tired of the dystopian plot in which there’s a lovely society but nothing is as it seems, the rulers who are in on the secret scare the people into compliance and commit violence to protect their perfect little society, etc. I’ve seen The Village. That’s enough for me. Did not finish.
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This was one of my favorite books as a child. Rereading it as an adult, I was struck by many things. First, the dialog was overly simple. Second, i see now where I acquired my life long love of treehouses and my fantasy of gliding through the forest. Last, I have no recollection of the dystopia the society turns out to be. I think it may have gone over my head 40 years ago. Not a brilliant book, but I had to give it a high rating because it influenced me so much.
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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).
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Great story
This is a fun story! I loved the computer game back in the 80s and always thought it should be a book. I just discovered it was actually part of a series. If you like fantasy, you will love this book ! -
Peter Jackson (director/writer of Lord of the Rings/Hobbit fame) needs to get his hands on this series. It would make a kick-ass movie! I'm just saying...
Re-reading this trilogy on a whim and loving it just as much.
