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".

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 co...

The Zilpha Keatly Snyder went up the waterspout.... Just had to get that out of my systemBought 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

I enjoyed this beautiful world and these interesting characters :)

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 fearso...

I just reread this, the first book in an awesome fantasy trilogy for children or young adults. It surprises me that this trilogy has never been that well-known or popular. It deals with serious themes: how a society might choose to rebuild after war and chaos; what happens when a corrupt government exists to sustain itself; how the average person will cling to the status quo, even if that means turning a blind eye to evil actions. There are similarities to The Giver, but this trilogy preceded Th...

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.

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 ever...

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 partic...

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

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.

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 an...

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 frustrat...

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 l...

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 glid...

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

11/16/19 on sale for $1.99 for Kindle.

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 u...

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, an

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 basicall...