Tree, Table, Book: Growing Through Self-Care This September
Book Reviews, Book Club Chats & Literary Escapes | Thursday, September 3, 2026 | Self-Care September
Tree, Table, Book is one of those rare novels — rare in any category, but especially rare in young adult fiction — that makes you feel held from the very first page and then, without warning, undone by something beautiful. Lois Lowry has been writing books like this for fifty years. This one feels like a summation.
Tree, Table, Book by Lois Lowry
Published in 2024, Tree, Table, Book is a novel for readers aged ten and up that adults have been quietly pressing into each other’s hands since the moment it appeared. It is 208 pages long and 3 hours if you enjoy it via audio. It will take you an afternoon. It will stay with you considerably longer than that.
The Story
Sophie Winslow is eleven years old, funny, and loyal, and her best friend in the world is named Sophie Gershowitz, who is eighty-eight. The two Sophies have known each other as long as Sophie Winslow can remember — they live near each other, they visit often, they talk about everything. Sophie W. has never thought much about the seventy-seven years between them. Friendship is friendship.
Then Sophie W. starts to notice things. Her older friend is repeating herself. She is forgetting small facts, then larger ones. When Sophie G.’s son announces he is making arrangements to move his mother to an assisted living facility, Sophie W. is determined to stop it. She finds a standard cognitive assessment in a medical book — a simple test in which a patient is asked to remember three objects: a tree, a table, a book — and decides to administer it herself. If Sophie G. can pass, there will be proof she can still live independently.
Sophie G. does not pass the test cleanly. But in the course of being asked to remember, something else happens entirely. The questions unlock stories Sophie G. has never told anyone — memories of her childhood in Poland in the 1930s and 1940s, of the world before the war and the world the war made, of losses she has carried for eight decades inside the ordinary rhythm of her days. Sophie W. listens. And in listening, she receives something she did not know she needed: the full weight and history of the person she loves.
Two Sophies, Two Centuries
What Lowry does with the structure of this novel is deceptively simple. Sophie W.’s voice — contemporary, eleven years old, warmly funny, slightly impatient in the way of children who love the adults in their lives but do not yet fully understand them — alternates with the historical scenes that Sophie G.’s memories unlock. Those scenes are rendered with the precision and restraint of someone who has been writing about the Holocaust for decades and understands exactly how much a child reader can hold and how to give it to them without breaking them.
The three objects of the title — tree, table, book — appear in each of those memories, transformed. What was asked as a clinical test becomes a thread connecting two women across time, across language, across everything that has separated them. By the end of the novel, those three words carry more weight than most novels manage in three hundred pages.
About Lois Lowry
Lois Lowry is eighty-seven years old and has been publishing books since 1977. She has won the Newbery Medal twice: for Number the Stars in 1990, her novel about a Danish family sheltering a Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation, and for The Giver in 1994, the dystopian novel that has been read by virtually every American middle schooler of the last three decades and banned in school districts in nearly as many. She received the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2007 for her lifetime contribution to young adult literature.
Lowry has said that she writes about difficult things because children are not fragile, and because the world they are growing into is not gentle, and because literature is one of the most honest ways to prepare them for it without hardening them against it. Tree, Table, Book is written with that philosophy at its core — it does not protect Sophie W. from what Sophie G. has survived. It trusts her to receive it, and trusts the reader to receive it alongside her.
That Tree, Table, Book was written when Lowry was eighty-six years old, and that it feels like the work of someone at the absolute height of their powers, is something worth sitting with for a moment.
What This Book Understands About Self-Care
We chose Tree, Table, Book for Self-Care September because it understands something about care that rarely gets said plainly: that truly caring for another person — really seeing them, asking them questions, staying with the answers — is also a form of caring for yourself. Sophie W. goes to her friend intending to save her. What she discovers is that her friend has been holding something enormous, alone, for most of her life, and that being asked to tell it — being given a witness — is itself a form of relief.
The novel is also, underneath everything, about memory and what we do with it. What we pass on. What we allow to be received. For Self-Care September, it arrives as a gentle reminder that the stories we carry are not meant to be carried alone — that asking someone to tell you theirs, and listening with your whole attention, is one of the most nourishing things a person can do. For both of you.
Who This Book Is For
Tree, Table, Book is published as middle-grade fiction for readers aged ten to adulthood, and it is a superb book for children in that range — particularly those with grandparents or older friends who they sense are carrying something they do not yet understand. It is equally suited to adult readers, particularly those who are thinking about aging, about memory, about the generations that preceded them, or about the stories in their own families that have not yet been told.
It is also, we would suggest, the ideal book to read aloud with someone you love. At 208 pages, it can be read together over a few evenings. The conversations it opens are worth more than its page count.
Coming Tuesday
Self-Care September continues Tuesday with our next feature. We hope this week’s two books — and this month’s theme — have already started something for you. We will see you Tuesday.
Until then — ask someone their story.
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Self-Care September — Week One
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