Though it took me almost two weeks to get into this book, I read almost the entire second half of it in just one day. The writing was so rich, so vibrant, and so raw that I truly felt like I had entered Rich, Colleen, and Chub's world.

I was absolutely devastated at the end of the book. The fact that I felt so strongly about these characters and saw the good in them despite seeing moments they weren't proud of, shows how compelling the story and these people are. Though it's a bit of a slow burn at first, I recommend if you're willing to stick with a story chock-full of environmentalism, a mother's love, and a gorgeous picture of a 1970s small logging town.

This is an epic family saga set in the redwood forests of northern California in the late 1970s. Logging has been Rich’s family’s livelihood for generations, but there are hardly any old-growth forests left, and tree-huggers are coming out in droves to protect what remains. Rich and his wife, Colleen, just want to do what’s best for their family; for Rich, this means making enough money so their son Chub doesn’t have to be a logger. For Colleen, this means figuring out why so many women in their community are losing babies.

Told from the point of view of Rich, Colleen, and Chub, it took me a good 25% to get into the story. Some of Rich’s parts were slow, but I loved Colleen and Chub and I ended up wanting to know what happened to this community and this family. Ash Davidson does a remarkable job making you understand both perspectives on logging. Damnation Spring is a novel about family and community, about how humans damage the environment, and about people who stand up for what they believe in. Recommended for fans of Greenwood, Once There Were Wolves and One Two Three.

DAMNATION SPRING is a quiet, “slice of life” novel about a family in a small lumberjack community in the 1970s. The loggers in the pacific northwest who use toxic herbicides to clear brush are at odds with environmental activists concerned about the removal of old growth trees and the harmful impacts of the chemicals, namely cancer and miscarriage/birth defects.

This is a book that pairs best with crisp fall air, piping hot tea, and the coziest of blankets. You really need to settle in here. The writing is very thorough, to the point that the mundane lives of the townspeople felt repetitive. On the other hand, the detail helped me feel invested in the characters so I was able to hope, empathize, and grieve with them.

While this was a beautifully written debut, the pacing missed the mark for me. The novel is 450+ pages, and the story wouldn’t have lost much with a solid paring down in my opinion. The plot finally got rolling around the 70% mark and the last 10% was nonstop action.

The last 50 pages of the book were fantastic and brought me to tears, but it took a lot of patience to get to this point. Ultimately, this book missed the forest for the trees. I’d recommend this for patient readers who enjoy a slower paced story about everyday struggles with an ending that packs a punch.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars (rounded up to 4)

This is an August @bookofthemonth selection. A big thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for an electronic ARC in exchange for an honest review.

#NetGalley #AshDavidson #DamnationSpring

Ash Davidson has authored a sweeping novel that digs into the lives in a logging community in the 1970’s.
Rich Gunderson’s life is logging. Proud of his work, strength and commitment, he spends his days among the Northern California redwoods. Rich is in his fifties, with a young wife Colleen and a son Chub. Knowing the danger of his work and having outlived his father and grandfather, his days as a logger are coming to an end. After his wife experiences a miscarriage and wanting to provide more for his growing family, he buys 24 - 7 Ridge with Colleen unaware of the purchase and the use of their life savings. The reality is, their family is not growing. Colleen, a midwife has experienced several miscarriage. In fact, many other women in this community have experienced the same loss. Colleen begins to wonder if the herbicides and chemicals used by the loggers are in fact harmful and may be affecting the community and causing repeated miscarriages.
Told in alternating chapters and the perspective of Rich, Colleen and Chub, this is a journey of family, the livelihood of a community, the fate of the environment and the struggle and emotional impacts in a search to find the truth.
My thanks to NetGalley, Ash Davidson and Scribner for the opportunity of receiving an ARC in exchange for an honest book review.

This is an incredible thoughtful and beautifully written novel about a logging community facing change and environmental concerns. Set over the course of 1977-1978, it's the story of Rich. his wife Colleen, their son Chub, and the people in their orbit. Rich is a fourth generation logger who finally takes a deep breath and a giant loan to buy a plot of land topped by a redwood he's watched for years. Colleen has had eight miscarriages, the last of which almost broke her, and she works as an unofficial midwife. Everyone is living on the knife edge- the logging business is dangerous and not well paid. Then Colleen's old love interest Daniel, now a biologist, comes back to town and begins to collect data about the impact of pesticides sprayed in the area. These characters, as well as others such as Lark, Enid, and so on, come off the page. Most importantly, Davidson has successfully portrayed both sides of an issue which remains devisive. No one is a demon. The atmospherics- especially the mud, the rain, the danger-add to the story and the tension. This might take a bit of patience in the beginning if you, like me, are unfamiliar with logging but please keep reading. I became deeply invested in these people and their town and by the end......Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. An important, immersive, impressive debut. Highly recommend.

"He pictured the 24-7 tree herself: a monster, grown even wider now than the twenty-four feet, seven inches that originally earned her the name, three hundred seventy feet high, the tallest of the scruff of old-growth redwoods left along the top of 24-7 Ridge. He’d circled that tree every morning for the last thirty-five years, figuring the best way to fall her, but it had always been just a story he’d told himself, like his father before him, and his granddad before that. Someday, Rich remembered his father saying. As a boy, it had seemed possible, though generations of Gundersens had died with the word on their breath. "

--------------------------------------

"'“The real timber’s gone,' Lark said. 'What’s left, ten percent, including the parks? Two thousand years to grow a forest, a hundred years to fall it. No plague like man.'”

It’s 1977 in Klamath, California. Redwood country. Rich Gunderson has rolled the dice. He staked all the money he and his wife, Colleen, have been saving to buy a once-in-a-lifetime piece of property, the 24-7, over seven hundred acres of old growth forest, ripe for logging. But he needs the Sanderson Timber Co., which he has been working for all his life, to build a road close enough to it that he can get the logs out. It seems likely to happen, given that Sanderson is currently logging adjacent parcels. But when a skull is found, all work is halted until it can be determined whether the logging will be allowed to continue. A halt could mean the difference between making back his investment and having land of his own, a place on which he and his family can live, with a nice bit of cash beside, and losing everything.

"The pilot had followed the coastline, turning inland at Diving Board Rock. It was Rich’s first and only ¬bird’s-eye view of his life: the small green house with its white shutters set back on the bluff at the foot of Bald Hill, the cedar-¬shingle tank shed. The plane’s ¬engine noise buzzed inside his chest, a hundred McCulloch chainsaws revving at once. They’d flown over 24-7 Ridge, the big tree herself lit by an errant ray of sun, glowing orange, bright as a torch, and, for an instant, Rich had caught a glimmer of the inholding’s potential—an island of private land in a sea of company forest. They’d flown over the dark waves of big pumpkins in Damnation Grove—redwoods older than the United States of America, saplings when Christ was born. Then came the patchwork of clear-cuts, like mange on a dog, timber felled and bucked and debarked, trucked to the mill, sawed into lumber, sent off to the kilns to be dried. The pilot had flipped a switch and spray had drifted out behind them in a long pennant—taste of chlorine, whiff of diesel—Rich’s heart soaring."

He and Colleen have suffered some serious losses already. They have a five-year-old son, Chub, who is about to start Kindergarten. But they had hoped for a larger brood. Colleen, only thirty-four, has just suffered her eighth miscarriage. Rich does not want for them to go through that again, so is keeping his distance, frustrating Colleen, who is eager to keep trying.

He does not keep his distance from this land, however. Carrying on the tradition of his father and grandfather before him, Rich is a high climber, a particularly perilous specialty in an already dangerous line of work. He is very fortunate to have lasted longer than his forebears, surviving into his fifties. Bunyonesque at over six feet six inches, Rich is a gentle giant, determined to take care of his family. But how he can go about doing that is becoming complicated. He remembers his father taking him up to the 24-7, and pointing out the biggest, (There she is. Twenty-four feet, seven inches across. Someday, you and me are going to fall that tree.) a lifetime ago, when his father had just turned thirty.

Colleen works as a midwife. Hers are not the only reproductive anomalies in the area. Miscarriages are rampant, as are birth defects. One woman she had been helping gave birth to a baby that was anencephalic. In the Library Journal interview, Davidson talks about her inspiration for the book.

"My family lived in Klamath, California, where the book is set. My parents weren’t loggers—my mom taught school, my dad did carpentry work. But they did rely on a nearby creek for drinking water, similar to Rich and Colleen's setup in the book, and became so concerned about herbicide contamination in that creek that they stopped drinking from our tap. Still today, not one of us does. I was three when we left Klamath, but I grew up hearing stories about our life there. I’d always wondered: what were those herbicides?" - from the Shelf Awareness interview

Daniel Bywater was raised locally. An erstwhile classmate and an old flame of Colleen’s, he is back in the area, doing a postdoc in fisheries biology, testing the water to see what might be causing the significant reduction in fish life. It is pretty clear that the cause is the toxic chemicals that Sanderson sprays relentlessly in the area, making sure the logging roads do not get overgrown, and access to the to-be-logged trees is uninhibited. With the prompt of Daniel, Colleen begins to see that the environment in which she lives may be a factor in her difficulties carrying a baby to term. The Gundersons get their water directly from Damnation Creek.

The conflict is set. Sanderson, eager to fend off any attempts to prevent them from clear-cutting the lands they control, versus those concerned with the health and safety of the people living and working in the area, and the carnage being wreaked on the local eco-system. The company is not above using bribery, blackballing, physical intimidation, and worse to control the allowable debate.

People are struggling. Deer Creek has dried up. It is probably wise to head indoors when the far-too-frequent company chopper passes overhead spraying something that smells of chlorine.
Folks live in single-wides or rent houses they used to own, now property of the government on a 25 year lease, after they were eminent-domained for parkland. Pay has been shifted from production based to a daily rate. Not an idyllic existence

It would be an easy thing to present the company as pure evil (well, it pretty much is here, so scratch that), and the locals who support cutting-uber-alles as ignorant rubes. Some are, and there are those who are willfully ignorant, and willing to go to dark extremes to protect their personal fortunes, but Davidson has offered instead a very close look at the crux of the conflict. Can you really expect people who, for generations, have known only one way of living, to welcome outsiders telling them that they can no longer continue to work the jobs they have worked for decades, to live the way they have been forever? Even if that way of life is harming them (it is), that harm may not be felt immediately. No one except the company owners and upper managers are living well. It is a hard-scrabble existence, even for the fully employed. The loss of that small income would be harsh and sudden. And there is no certainty that other means of getting by will magically appear. For good or ill, people’s livelihoods are tied to the survival of the timber company. To damage that is to imperil them all. In showing the perspective of the people residing in the affected area, Davidson treats the issues she raises in a serious, nuanced, and respectful manner.

”'Ask any of these guys. You won’t find a guy that loves the woods more than a logger. You scratch a logger, you better believe you’ll find an ‘enviro-mentalist’ underneath. But the difference between us and these people is we live here. We hunt. We fish. We camp out. They’ll go back where they came from, but we’ll wake up right here tomorrow. This is home. Timber puts food on our tables, clothes on our kids’ backs. You know, a redwood tree is a hard thing to kill. You cut it down, it sends up a shoot. Even fire doesn’t kill it. Those big pumpkins up in the grove, they’re old. Ready to keel over and rot. You might as well set a pile of money on fire and make us watch.'”

It is clear that, even though he is in the business of removing trees from the landscape, that Rich does have a feel for, a love of the land. He often brings his son out into the woods to show him the woods, the topography, the beauty of their home. Rich wants to make sure he passes on what he can while he can. A charming element of this is when Rich teaches his son to use his hand as a map of their area. I could not help but think of Rich as a Fess-Parker-as-Davy-Crockett-or-Daniel-Boone sort, substantial, serious. But also kind and educable, interested in doing right by his family. This creates an internal conflict for him. Protect his family by seeing to it that the land he bought gets logged, and thus ensure their financial future, or consider that maybe Colleen is right to be concerned about the perils to them all of Sanderson’s spraying.

It is not spraying alone that is problematic. Hillsides, denuded of the plant life that held firmly onto the ground, lose their ability to absorb the considerable rain that falls in the area, and their ability to remain in place. It has got to be tough to remain connected to the land if the very land itself is washing away.

Colleen suffers additional misery to that of enduring multiple miscarriages from the fact that her sister, Enid, seems to get pregnant at the drop of a condom. Enid uncrosses her legs for two minutes and a baby pops out.

There is imagery aplenty to help things along. The huge lighthouse of a redwood has already been mentioned as a symbol of both permanence and possibility. Rich endures a bad tooth for much of the novel, maybe a conscience, or growing awareness that needs tending to. A dog which has had its vocal cords cut by a heartless owner surely stands in for silencing alarms of impending danger in the wider world. Showing the multigenerational element of the community reminded me of judging the age of a tree by the number of rings, but I am pretty sure that is just my projection.

"I think sometimes we assume that working in an industry like logging is a choice easily substituted with another choice, but there is real grief in letting go of a good job that has defined you. Damnation Spring is set forty years ago, but we see parallels in industry today. There are plenty of reasons why a coal miner in West Virginia can’t just pick up and move west to work on a solar farm. When your whole life is in a place, the idea of uprooting it is so overwhelming, it’s understandable that dying in the life you know might be preferable to starting over." - from the Library Journal interview

There are also a larger perspectives one can see here. We can see in the microcosm of a small community what a larger society might look like when there is only one dominant political and economic power source, and it acts in its own interest regardless of the harm it does to all around it, and having no respect for the truth. This is what happens when there is power without accountability. Davidson shows how behavior ripples outward, from industry to community to family to individuals. The feckless, short-term profit-motive of Sanderson Timber forces the community to come to grips (or not) with the ecological and personally biological impacts of its work, which manifests in public (and secretive) behavior, pushing families into hard choices, and impacting individual lives. There is also the larger echo of events over four decades back (and more) impacting the world today. How much carbon in the atmosphere, for example, is not being sequestered because of clear-cutting? How many species of animal and plant life are being exterminated because of short term profit motives? And there is the immediate contemporary echo of so much of the planet still being plundered instead of managed, harvested, and renewed.

The story is told from the alternating perspectives, Rich, Colleen and Chub.

"Damnation Spring started out as a first-person novel in Rich's voice. But I kept running into walls--things he couldn't know or wouldn't notice. Even after I added Colleen, they were both so quiet. I needed Chub. He's curious. He's lower to the ground. He's five at the beginning of the book. I'd worked as a nanny, so I had some experience with children that age. They're observant, but not judgmental, and still fully alive to the magic of the world, from birds' nests to Bigfoot." - from the Shelf Awareness interview

This works well to offer a rounded take on the action of the story.

Davidson spent the first three years of her life in Klamath, not of a logging family. Mom was a teacher, dad a carpenter. But they used a nearby creek for drinking water, like Rich and Colleen in the novel. Her parents became concerned about chemicals in the water, so stopped using it. Davidson heard about this later on, but retained curiosity about the experience. The story grew from that to wondering about how families and a whole community might respond when their homes, their communities became unsafe to live in.

Gripes
Throughout the course of the book we are given relentless examples of the horrors being inflicted on people, fauna, and flora, in addition to the huge reproductive issues. Beehives are obliterated, diseased deer stumble through the woods, nosebleeds are ubiquitous. This can get overbearing, as if we are being beaten over the head with it all, over and over and over. Yes, yes. Everything is being poisoned. Do we really need twenty more examples? Got it.

The story-telling is effective. We see the characters and how their relationships with each other work. It is dense with detail, but maybe too much detail, enough so that it makes it, sometimes, tough to see the forest for the trees, and sometimes a slog to read.

There is a response Rich has late in the book to something Colleen does that had me thinking of the real-life Daniel Boone. I understand the possibility of his response, but found it a bit of a stretch to accept in the 20th century, in the culture which is portrayed. He might have reached the destination to which he arrives, but it would have been with considerably more weeping and gnashing of teeth. In this case, maybe, a bit more detail would have been warranted.

Overall, though, Damnation Spring is a powerful example of eco-lit, a humanity-based look at crimes against nature, featuring strongly-drawn characters that you can care about, dastardly doings enough to keep the action moving, some payload on the dynamics within a stressed logging community, and more on the impact of chemical spraying and clear-cutting. The book is printed on recycled paper, but you might feel more comfortable giving the trees a break and reading this one as an e-book.

"You can bury us, but you can’t keep us from digging our way out".


Review posted – July 30, 2021

Publication date – August 3, 2021


I received an ARE of Damnation Spring from Scribner, of Simon & Schuster, in return for some seedlings and fertile soil. Thanks to ZC at S&S for providing, Cai at GR for cluing me in to this book, and NetGalley for facilitating.

For the full review, with links, and images, please go the version posted at Goodreads, here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4139779315

Ash Davidson storms upon the literary scene with her debut novel set in 1970s Klamath, California, giant redwood country. Complex and gritty, touching and heartbreaking, Damnation Spring focuses on Rich, Colleen, and Chub Gundersen--a lumberman, his much younger wife, and their young son. Chapters alternate between the three..

Rich Gundersen’s life has been lived among the giant redwoods, and in his 50s he has already outlived his lumberman grandfather and father. While Rich was still a child, his dad had taken him up 24-7 Ridge and announced that one day the two of them would cut the largest redwood there. With his father’s death a week later, Rich began to think of that job as his destiny. Not marrying until his 40s, Rich fathered Graham, commonly called Chub. By the time Chub is ready to start kindergarten, Rich has drawn a map on the boy’s hand and began teaching him to navigate lumber country by following the rivers and springs.

Davidson opens her book with two epigraphs that set the scene and the mood: “They are not like any trees we know” from John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and “It’s easier to die than to move” from Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. The redwoods stand firmly rooted in the land and provide the Gundersen men’s traditional source of income, but maintaining that tradition comes with a cost.

While Rich sets his course to fulfill his destiny, Colleen craves another child. Chub, her one miracle, is the only baby to survive despite her series of pregnancies. Meanwhile, Rich, who doesn’t want her to suffer again, turns away from her physically, focusing on providing for his family and determining to make his fortune from 24-7 Ridge. When opportunity arises, he takes concealed from Colleen. Although he convinces himself he will tell her, he cannot seem to find the right time.

Warnings and obstacles arise one after another. Other women suffer miscarriages or give birth to babies who cannot survive. Animals ranging from chickens to deer produce deformed offspring. Environmentalists and hippie tree-huggers arrive to research and raise questions, to protest and delay.

In an interview with Library Journal, Ash Davidson explains that she grew up in the area and wanted to learn more about the environmental pollution that caused her own family to avoid local water sources. Following research and interviews, she wrote this story of a well-intentioned husband and father caught up in making a dangerous living in the way he knows how, of the difficulty of facing the environmental hazards brought on by chemical defoliation, of the risks of what Davidson describes in the Library Journal interview as “biting the hand that feeds, even if it’s also poisoning you.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for an advance reader copy.

Damnation Spring might be the best book of 2021 but I’ll never know because I gave up on it very early on.
Nobody told me that logging experience would be required to understand anything that any of the characters were saying. After reading some Goodreads reviews, it doesn’t sound like it gets easier as it goes.
I have way too many books to read to invest the kind of time that I feel this book will need.
Thanks, anyway, to #netgalley for this ARC of #damnationspring in exchange for an honest review.

I was so excited going into this book, but unfortunately it fell flat for me. The writing was incredibly bland and the story felt pointlessly slow.

Damnation Spring is an impressive debut novel. Set in the logging world it centers on the Gundersen Family’s long connection. To the land of the redwood trees. The story develops slowly and grabs hold of the reader right to the end. The use of herbicides and how it effects everyone in the area is appalling and emotional. I am definitely recommending Damnation Spring to my book clubs.

How does a debut author write a novel so self assured and heavily researched, while highlighting characters and families that are so obviously blemished ? Davidson has done this and more with her quietly empathetic look at loggers ,protestors, and family communication. Rich Gunderson is part of a 4th generation of loggers, and has an opportunity to buy a swath of land to elevate his family's fortune, but does so without telling his wife Colleen. Meanwhile Colleen is painfully distressed having had several miscarriages. What compounds the problem is that she acts as a midwife and has to witness live births and then the sudden escalation of problematic births. When an old boyfriend turns up and tests the waters, he believes the herbicides used in logging are causing these stillbirths and deformities.
Just as coalminers have been asked to leave their precarious jobs from working in the mines and the development of "black lung", this situation portrays the tug and pull of working in an occupation that has been the livelihood for a community's lives with little inability to imagine uprooting and changing their line of work. Tensions between the characters are skillfully drawn producing an environmental astute commentary reflective of the times.
I have to admit that the technicality of the logging terms put me off at first and I found myself not wanting to continue but this is a novel that demands pushing forward.

What a wonderful novel! It’s a little slow at the start and it saturates the reader with many details, details that seem unimportant until they become important components of the story later on. Although this is her debut novel, Ash is already a highly skilled writer. She brings each character to full life, using changing perspectives to enhance rather than to confuse, as so many lesser talented writers seem to do these days. Her ability to bring her setting to life and to provide details about logging without drowning the reader in them is to be admired. Readers who are interested in books with environmental themes can add this to the growing list of ‘must read’ novels (Once There Were Wolves is another excellent read) that tackle the theme without letting it overwhelm the story of real people whose way of life is changing. Highly recommended.

Although environmental stories are not my usual reads, I was intrigued by the premise from the opposite perspective. Instead of focusing on the “tree huggers” (which was the focus of my last environmental book), this one focuses on the working class loggers in the 1970s.

Rich has been cutting down redwood trees as long as he can remember. Almost 50 now and after his younger wife’s miscarriage, he makes the decision to use their life savings to buy a huge section of land with the intention to profit off the cut redwoods.

Unknown to him, his wife, Colleen, begins to question whether her miscarriage (and the seven previous ones which she kept a secret) were caused by the sprays used to keep the land free of weeds. Working in secret with her ex boyfriend, she begins to wonder whether the nose bleeds, cancers, and deaths are worth it trade off for the income Rich gets.

The story is also told through Chub’s perspective. As their only kid, his chapters showcase his innocence in what’s going on around him.

The synopsis that I provided should have really set the background for the story, but instead this plot lasted for over 70% of the novel. Every plot point that I mentioned kept getting repeated and it seemed that there was no escalation.

You may be asking me what then was happening for majority of the book?

Well, we really meet a lot of random and pretty asshole-ish characters. By a LOT, it honestly felt like every chapter a new character was interjected. I didn’t use the word introduced, because no introduction was ever given. They would just appear using logger jargon. Their whole family was also mentioned as if we should know who they are in relation to Rich or Colleen. I honestly wouldn’t be able to describe the other characters no matter how hard I tried (and trying to find them in the book would be impossible).

There was also a weird focus on some storylines. Rich’s toothache was mentioned so many times for absolutely no reason. We’re given background on his previous dentist. We’re told the life story of the current dentist he refuses to see. We get a random chapter of him going to the dentist. It makes no sense.

Overall, maybe the last 10% of this book actually felt like something was going on. I still don’t completely understand what’s happening with the land in the end (but I can’t say I ever knew what was going on with it).

I might have set too high expectations for this and ultimately had to really push myself to read to the very end.

This gritty tale of a logging family is complicated and eye-opening. Having never known how the logging industry works, this story tells of the harsh reality of living and working in a logging town. Told in three perspectives, each perspective shows how a family interacts and is affected as part of the logging community. Rich Gundersen has logging in his blood, logging has been a part of his family for generations. Rich has dreams of providing for his family with one big risk. Colleen Gundersen is the local midwife, but with each child that is born with defects, stillborn or miscarried, the women start to lose their confidence in her. Colleen herself has miscarried multiple pregnancies and desperately wants another child. Chub, the only child of Colleen and Rich is well loved, worships his fathers, adores his mother. However, even a child can be affected by logging. Each character brings their hurts, worries, dreams, and joys to the story. This story is full of heartbreak, gritty reality, harsh living conditions, shameful secrets but also love. Love of family, love of a spouse, love of a child and love of a community. It took me a bit to get into the story but I was glad I finished it.

First, know that I started this novel early one morning and stayed up until 5 a.m. to finish it. Ash Davidson's novel about families, forests and the environment is so relevant in today's climate. The novel is set in the late 1970s, but its issues apply to any time. Colleen and Rich are struggling to survive in the world of logging redwoods in California It's a dangerous profession with daily life-threatening risks. Money is tight, but families are, too. They must rely on each other in good times and bad. And bad times have arrived. Something is causing babies to be stillborn or with only partial brains. Commercial logging is leading to more mudslides, cutting residents off from the few resources they have. Add in corporate greed, environmentalists and the human desire to do better, and readers get a clear idea of the struggles facing the region. Through it all, the importance of standing together as a family and holding onto doing what's right speaks loud and clear.

“You won’t find a guy that loves the woods more than a logger. You scratch a logger, you better believe you’ll find an ‘enviro-mentalist’ underneath. But the difference between us and these people is we live here. We hunt. We fish. We camp out. They’ll go back where they came from, but we’ll wake up right here tomorrow. This is home.”

Set in the late 1970’s, along the coast in California redwood country, this novel took my breath away. The division between environmentalists trying to save the forest, and generations of logging families trying to save their lives and livelihoods, is expected, but stunning. The overlapping events and often misguided reactions create drama that had me speeding through the pages. As a child of the 60s, when our mothers were told that smoking and drinking while pregnant was completely safe, I am grateful to now live in a different time. And moving forward, this debut novel has encouraged me to keep asking the unasked and difficult questions.

The three points of view artfully guide a well conceived plot along with a precision and cadence I rarely experience. Perhaps my favorite, 5 year old Chub’s story, provided reality (along with levity) to some heartbreaking and heartwarming situations.

Recommended for fans of The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

Thank you to Scribner Publishing and NetGalley for the privilege of reading an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review. My review will be published on Goodreads and bookstagram account @bookshelfbybeckwith closer to publication.

Set in the Pacific Northwest, the story of a town that is known for their logging. Rich, Colleen and Chubb Gunderson are the family of this epic story. Set in the late 70’s they are a family trying to survive, but seem to always have major setbacks as this story tells.

Rich is older when he marries Colleen, but he is known as being one of the nicest guys ever. All he has ever known is logging. He sets his mind to buy his own parcel, where he can make some serious money. Colleen, loves her husband and her son, but deals with the nightmare of 8 miscarriages and the want for another child. She is also the unofficial mid-wife for this town. Chubb their young son loves his dad more than anything, and grows up with his close-knit friends and family.

While things seem quite good by the setup, the Gunderson’s and town are struggling. Many people are suffering miscarriages or worse, by the spraying they do in the forests. Also, the town is making deals that cause a ripple affect for many people.

This is a beautiful family drama. Told from the perspective of all three of the Gunderson, Ash Davidson gives us an unforgettable story. It is a lengthy book, but with very short chapters that kept this story moving quickly. For people who love the family narrative this is a can’t miss.

Thank you NetGalley and Scribner for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Damnation Spring felt oddly disjointed to me. I honestly am going to have to DNF this book because I can't seem to get into the dialogue or the characters. The writing jumps around a lot for me, sometimes honing in on smaller, minute details that don't seem to add anything to the story or the situation at hand. There was nothing to grip me in this tale or keep me invested.

It's going to take a while for me to get over this book. Unlike most of the other books I have read recently, this one touches upon something very real but forgotten issue. It shows the war between "loggers" and "environmentalists" where it should have been war between "capitalists" and "others". The loggers were the ones who paid the actual price for this war. Because they were the working class. They didn't have much saying into what their masters decide. They didn't know they were the victims of same crime killing their livelihood while all they think of was keeping food at the table.

These loggers have been working at these redwood forests for generations. When a father was killed on the job, the son took over his spot only to leave it to his own son after. It's a dangerous job and Rich didn't want his son to be part of this vicious cycle. On a whim, he decided to buy the patch of land that was everyone's dream to stop his son from being a logger as well. Unfortunately, he didn't know others' plans.... While he was trying to figure out what to dos and how to dos, his wife was suffering multiple miscarriages.

Ash Davidson had very tasteful way of weaving different aspects into this story in a balanced manner. Like I said this tragedy will stay with me for long time. I think everyone should read this book.

Damnation Spring is an ambitious, heart-wrenching debut with beautifully flawed characters and an immersive setting. It’s not often a book brings me to tears, but this book left me an emotional mess. I won’t be surprised if it ends up as one of my top reads for the year. I would even venture to say it’s a perfect novel.

While it took me a while to settle into, by the end of the book I was completely invested in the story of this broken and troubled family. I didn’t want to leave them. Davidson has brought a small logging town in the 1970s Pacific Northwest to life. And while some of the logging jargon was hard to follow at times, it never took me out of the book. In fact, it made it even more real.

And that’s what they made Google for, anyway, right?? I love when a good story also teaches me something.

I was repeatedly impressed with Davidson’s ability to have me sympathizing with the loggers when I knew if I was plopped down into this story, I’d be one of the hippie tree-huggers. She humanized each character, whether they were ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

The book is told from three different points of view: Rich, his wife Colleen, and their five year old son Chub. I was never lost when the views changed, each voice distinct and beloved by the end.

While it deals with some very heavy and serious subjects—environmental degradation, infidelity, miscarriage, birth defects—at its heart, it’s a novel about perseverance, family history, commitment, and love. This story wrecked me. In a good way, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.