A single ancient willow grows in the middle of open land, slated for development. A man wanders the open space, recalling his memories and the preservation order he has managed to place to save it, for if the tree dies so will something very special.

I’ll handle the flaws first, since I am being pedantic. The writing is good but the grammar lets it down and there are some questionable choices, e.g. “the builder’s lunches” makes little sense as there are normally multiple builders on a site, and if you claim the building company is one entity I can only point out that companies don’t eat. The formatting uses the firstline indent style, which is done consistently throughout, but there’s a double linebreak near loc 35 and another by loc 47 which confused me, as they aren’t scene or paragraph breaks. The author loves commas and tends to use two or three in a sentence. Parsing exactly which commas are being used in what way can be rather difficult. For this type of complex writing colons and semi-colons may have made it easier to read.

Even with these flaws though, it is a sad and touching little story, depressingly realistic despite the paranormal aspect. Similar things aren’t just known to happen on developments, they’re depressingly common (I grew up with a tree that survived builders trying to ‘accidentally’ fell it with a forklift truck because it was in their way). After the first couple of pages, once I was used to the writing style, I was quickly drawn in by the story.

This isn’t a story for children due to only one aspect though an adult censoring that scene might have something they could read to younger children. The paranormal elements are strong, but it is not about the paranormal, with the strongest themes being loss, growing up, and despair.

It also makes it sadly clear how futile it is to try to stop the continued vandalism of our countryside. This is a story that needs to be read, but the people who need to read it wouldn’t realise why.

Despite grammar that is sometimes hard to parse, this tragic, inevitable, little story is a must-read for paranormal readers, people who enjoy tales of love and loss, or those who love the British countryside.