Damnation Spring - BookWyrm

hardcover, 448 pages

Published Aug. 3, 2021 by Scribner.

ISBN:: 978-1-9821-4440-1
OCLC Number:: 1259593185

(1 review)

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient Redwoods. Colleen, desperate to have a second baby, challenges the logging company’s use of herbicides that she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community—including her own. Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict that threatens the …

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient Redwoods. Colleen, desperate to have a second baby, challenges the logging company’s use of herbicides that she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community—including her own. Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict that threatens the very thing they are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

8 editions

GG reviewed Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson

Review of 'Damnation Spring' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

2.5 stars. This is yet another novel that I enjoyed, but needed an editor. It doesn’t earn its 464 pages, and could have easily lost 100 pages of repetitive character details that didn’t add much. However, the prose is crisp, the characters are empathetic and believable, and the author does a great job of conveying the experience of living in a Pacific Northwest logging town in the 70s. It’s tough to get anyone to empathize with a would-be villain who has a lust to destroy an old-growth redwood that’s thousands of years old and keeps his dog tied outdoors on a chain, but somehow the author does it. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this because of the unnecessary length, and I felt like the story had a lot of interesting subplots that I wish the author would have followed in a more satisfying way, but I look forward to seeing what …

2.5 stars. This is yet another novel that I enjoyed, but needed an editor. It doesn’t earn its 464 pages, and could have easily lost 100 pages of repetitive character details that didn’t add much. However, the prose is crisp, the characters are empathetic and believable, and the author does a great job of conveying the experience of living in a Pacific Northwest logging town in the 70s. It’s tough to get anyone to empathize with a would-be villain who has a lust to destroy an old-growth redwood that’s thousands of years old and keeps his dog tied outdoors on a chain, but somehow the author does it. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this because of the unnecessary length, and I felt like the story had a lot of interesting subplots that I wish the author would have followed in a more satisfying way, but I look forward to seeing what this author writes next.