Damnation Spring is a beautiful slow burn of a novel. Davidson has created a world that is simple but as the book goes on, you become invested in it. Rich and Colleen’s story is realistic and shows the good and bad of living in a logging community and of marriage. I would recommend this for fans of Kristen Hannah.

“𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘪𝘵. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘢𝘴𝘬 𝘸𝘩𝘺.”

𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐄𝐖: rich, colleen, and chub live in a logging community that is experiencing challenges. their use of herbicides in the field could potentially be the link of the many infertility issues & birth defects of the community.

𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐒: this book was good. the characters were extremely well developed, the story was really beautiful. i loved the sense of community in the book in the sense that families living this type of lifestyle really do rely on their neighbors, friends & family to get through. i think though that i struggled a bit with the length of the book as well as with the heavy logging terminology. other then that i was deeply moved by colleen’s story especially. my heart just broke for her over and over again and honestly the ending truly did me in. i felt like i knew colleen and even chub so well that i felt every ounce of pain they felt at the end. i think if you’re someone who can handle a very slow placed book and someone that loves character development you should definitely give this one a try. i think it’s totally worth the time.

𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆: i liked it!

thank you to scribner, netgalley and ash davidson for a copy of this arc in exchange for an honest review!

I've been on a "historical fiction" kick lately--basically anything that takes place from 1970-2000ish, where everything is reasonably modern (cars, house phones) but without cell phones and social media, so this was perfect for me right now. I love that disorienting feeling when I'm reading a book like this and main character, a man in his fifties, is talking about about his father....and I realize that father was born in the 1800's. I also enjoyed the small logging town--this books take place in 1977, right as the industry and the way of life for this California town in coming to a close and it is fascinating to watch people fight against their own environmental interests, particularly in regards to the weed killing sprays.

It's a good book, with a great setting, however...it's too long. It drags hard in places. I'm fine letting my eyes skim over some of the technical logging stuff, but there were some darlings that needed to be killed here. It's not supposed to be a plot-driven book (definitely read it for the slice-of-life moments, not any exciting twists), but all of the foreshadowing is overdone, and it ends with an unnecessary attempt at drama/tear jerking that I could have done without. I could have forgiven all of this and it probably would have been a 4 star if it had been shorter--an unsatisfying ending hurts less when I've got less time invested.

*eARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was very hopeful going into this, as it promised the community feeling, family story with heart but also weight that I was looking for. Unfortunately, I thought this story was bogged down by an overload of logging details and description, that did little for the story itself. Not my favorite, but also not horrible.

Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
In Damnation Spring, we are in 1977 with Colleen and Rich and their young son, Chub. They live on the California coast in a logging town that for decades, the town has survived on timber. Desperately wanting to expand her family, Colleen starts to believe that the herbicides used are the cause of her miscarriages as do several other women in town. Sounds like a great atmospheric novel with a bit of Erin Brockovich tossed in. Unfortunately, I found this book to be extremely slow moving. There is an overabundance of technical terms and logging slang and descriptions. I found myself drifting off and setting this down more often than not. The premise was good but the execution, not so much.
Thank you Netgalley for the advanced readers copy in exchange for my review.

This is a engrossing story of life in the 1970s logging community on the northwest coast of america through the eyes of three people: Colleen, RIch and Chubb (Graham) - a mom, dad and child. The story alternates between their perspectives and discusses a time in history where pesticides were being heavily used without concern for their toxicity. It is a beautifully written story that coneveys the emotional and financial struggles of this family to live in a world that is slowly killing them, their livestock and poisinging their food and water sources. Each character is detailed to the right amount so you connect and empathize deeply. I very much enjoyed this work and look forward to more from this author.

Damnation Spring

This immersive crossroads of historical and literary fictions takes a hard look at logging in the 1970s on the California coast.

While I was eager to learn more about life for those in the timber trade, I was shocked by how much this story spoke to me as a mother. The use of chemicals by the local logging chemical is causing women in the area to miscarry or give birth to children with, often fatal, defects. It is shocking, it is heartbreaking, but it is handled beautiful by author Ash Davidson.

I loved the change in perspective. Both Rich and Colleen are flawed but wonderful characters. Their issues are so much bigger than them but strangely relatable at the same time.

Overall, a beautiful story that I feel lucky to have read. The only thing that makes it not a perfect 5 star read was the ending. Oof. I don’t mind killing off a main character but it seemed like almost an afterthought. Either way, I have and would recommend Damnation Spring to everyone!

Set in the late 1970s, an aging logger Rich and younger wife Colleen have a young son nicknamed Chub, they struggle to get by as money is always tight. Colleen is obsessed with having another child, distraught over it and she serves as a mid-wife to the small logging community, yet whenever she is around a pregnant woman, she feels anguish and longing. She lost many herself, eight all told, with the last one being the most difficult for her and Rich. He shuns her sexually now, not wanting her to become pregnant again.

Colleen’s ex-boyfriend turns up, a scientist who’s back to help out with his mom who has cancer. He starts talking about chemicals in the water, all the spraying that is done to keep down the “weed” trees, the damage it does to animals, to people. His presence brings up questions for everyone.

The book felt belabored at times. There was too much daily detail and not enough thrust of a plot. We have short chapters with Chub’s viewpoint that don’t add very much to the story other than length. When the plot starts moving forward it then falters and stalls with more characters and situations that don’t add to the overall arch of the story. The end of the book throws in some drama that seemed unnecessary and didn’t save the book for me at all.

Reading this book was quite impactful, my husband also choosing to read it after I finished. The main characters, Rich and Coleen Gunderson’s awakening to the mystery behind so many losses and suffering in their California logging town was heartbreaking. It takes its toll on their marriage, and affects the relationships with their family, friends, and coworkers. This is such an important, well-written debut about our environment. A must read!

What a perfect, beautifully written book with a pointlessly tragic ending! Just, WHY??? Ugh. 😭 I still think it deserves to win awards. The author has such a unique way of describing everything and I loved how we only saw certain events from Chub's POV because of how those things came across through a child's perspective. I felt totally immersed in the beautiful setting, and fell in love with all of the characters, in spite of their faults. I want everyone to know how good this is, but at the same time, it needs a warning for some very difficult topics. Some of it was expected since a huge part of the plot is how the herbicides affect children and unborn babies. It's in the main description, but it was more graphic and detailed than I anticipated, so maybe skip this one if you're pregnant or sensitive to those topics. Then the ending, while still being sort of hopeful, was so sad and I don't understand why it had to end that way.

i just put this book down and I am unwell. At the risk of providing spoilers, I am going to refrain from providing my initial reaction - but OOF.

While the main driver of the plot is the environmental effects of pesticides and an economic shift away from logging - this story is really about family, chosen and otherwise. Davidson deftly paints marriage as an imperfect union, which requires a push and pull at all times. The relationship between Rich, Colleen and Chub also felt beautifully real - as you watch two people do anything they can to keep their only child safe - even if it endangers their livelihood.

I can't believe this was a debut, Davidson writes with the pen of a poet and longtime pro. With each page, I felt myself increasingly submerged in the landscape of Northern California. It likely helps that I'm not too far north in Oregon and fairly familiar with many of the places mentioned.

A heart-wrenching, emotional gut punch - Damnation Spring is easily devoured - but sure to slow down and savor it for a second.

I loved this book. It was an interesting mix of family interaction and managing the redwood forests. I learned a lot about generations of families who lived next to these trees and used these forests to make their livings. It included tree huggers and portrayed both sides of this issue well.

I don’t know why I keep picking up books about trees. I do not like books about trees. I also wish I had looked into some of the trigger warnings before requesting this book. Unfortunately, I did not finish this book. I do not typically give star ratings to books I didn’t finish, but NG requires it. Please know that this was a case of it’s not you, book, it’s me. I can see why so many loved this book, but it just was not really for me. Thank you to Net Galley and Scribner for the gifted copy.

“The real timber’s gone… 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.”


We’re seeing a lot of really interesting…I guess eco-fiction (?) right now—The Overstory, Once There Were Wolves, The Music of Bees. And now, Damnation Spring.

Please forgive any typos. I just finished the book about fifteen minutes ago and am cranking this review out at superspeed before I lose steam on it.

If anyone knows, please tell me the technical genre name for prosey fiction that focuses on how humans interact with the environment, the dismissal of the limited nature of earth’s resources while acting disdainfully towards those who would try to protect and heal it, the massively unregulated or ignored regulations surrounding environment-related practices and substances in favor of profit, and like…the human hubris (both individual and collective) of the idea that man is somehow entitled to the resources on this planet, contributing to the deterioration of those resources beyond a sustainable capacity. These are all cautionary tales whether you read them as such or not.

Anyway, I like eco-fiction, but I’m open to other suggestions.

Damnation Spring is the story of Colleen and Rich, residents in a Northern California logging town. Rich, like most of the men in the community, is a logger. Colleen is an amateur midwife desperate to have another child, even in the wake of several miscarriages, who begins to notice a disturbing trend of miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects she suspects are directly tied to the logging company’s herbicides.

I struggled with this one a bit, and I have a lot of the same gripes you’ll read in other reviews. This was a nearly 500-page book that definitely could have been about 200 to 250 pages lighter, and would have been much better for it. If Moby Dick taught me everything I never needed to know and much more about living and working on 19th-century whaling vessels, Damnation Spring gave me a couple hundred unnecessary pages on West Coast logging culture in the late 1970s. And much life Melville and his four chapters on whale anatomy, I just found a lot of Damnation Spring painfully slow and dense to read through.

Which is unfortunate because at the heart of all those words is a story set against the backdrop of an interesting and pivotal period of environmental upheaval and public outcry for change and regulation of things like, say…industrial herbicides. Add in having to dance around a hundred different characters—many of them extraordinarily unlikeable—to the point that I lost the ability to keep track of them.

I think it was around the halfway point that we finally got to the plot. It still didn’t pick up that much, but at least the plot I was promised in the blurb was there.

Ultimately, I think this book suffered from trying to do too much and not efficiently using the space it had to address everything. In almost 500 pages, things could have been much more cleanly explored and resolved. The ending was less of a climax and more of a book just stopping, which is always something that irks me.

It’s all so frustrating because when we get into the nitty-gritty of the plot, when we get to see the family dynamics and the conflict therein, when we really see what each side is fighting for and how they each believe so deeply in their respective causes, the story flows. The writing is good and punchy, and the pages seem to fly by. But then we inevitably hit another snag and slip back into stagnancy, and it’s so frustrating to get glimpses of the potential in this novel only to have it buried again under a mountain of unnecessary words. The last 10% was solid, even if it feels (impossibly) like we were missing 10 or so pages at the very end.

And what a feeling to have after slogging through all of that.

Thank you muchly to NetGalley and Scribner for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately, I could not finish Damnation Spring. I have been trying to read it and get into it for a couple weeks now, and it's just not piquing my interest whatsoever. I had to put it down for good at about 30%. While I enjoyed Colleen's perspective and was interested in learning more about her, I really hated the inclusion of Chub's perspective. Moreover, there were so many characters who matter to the plot of the story, but I had a really hard time keeping track of who is who and why they are important. Maybe at a different time of the year would I be interested in this book enough to sit down and finish it, but, right now, it's just not the read for me.

Damnation Spring follows the story of a single family: Rich, Colleen, and their son, Chub. Rich is a tree topper, and with a single gamble takes his families savings to purchase land with a lot of possibility (aka good trees to cut). Colleen is a town midwife that hasn’t had a lot of business recently after she had several miscarriages. These parents find themselves on opposing sides when people start to wonder if the herbicides used on the trees is causing birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer.

This book is told from multi-perspectives and takes place over the course of a year.

I did not enjoy this one. It just slugged along and I could never really get into it. I didn’t feel that much of a connection with the characters and found myself just wanting to get it over with. Unfortunately, I’m grateful this is over.

*thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review*

This book was a very slow burn, but it was beautifully written. With so many vivid details, I could *see* the redwood forest, I could *smell it even. But the greatest strength of the story was also it’s greatest weakness, as all the repetitive description of the forest & the logging industry made it a far longer book than it needed to be.
I did love getting to know the characters, and the late 70’s setting was spot on. The interaction of the locals with the tourists & “hippies” was perfectly portrayed. It was truly heartbreaking to read about the struggle between the generations of loggers facing a dying livelihood and the environmentalists who were struggling to be heard.
Overall, a good book, but at least 100 pages too long.

While I completely enjoyed the premise, seeing, and community live in this story, I did have a hard time keeping focus throughout the long descriptive scenes.

There were some truly amazing parts on this that really drew me in and in those tones I absolutely loved it. Honestly it was super touch and go for me throughout.

I was prepared to give this four stars, but the ending left me disappointed. I'd still recommend this book, though, as it's obvious Davidson did extensive research into the logging industry and environmentalism circa the late 1970s. Her characters are varied and interesting, and the pace of the book is quick, which can be rare for a 400-plus page book.

If you can get past the logging descriptions, technical terms, equipment specs, weird jargon and a bleak slog, you will be rewarded richly with Damnation Spring. I definitely don't think this is a book for everyone, but it hits some really lovely and meaningful themes about environmental responsibility and tight-knit communities. And theoretically, that's all I want in a book. Give me small town relationships, give me the reckoning of man made environmental destruction, give me slow burn, give me gorgeous descriptive writing. But ultimately, aside from Rich and Colleen, there are too many characters and too many are wholly unlikeable. I had a hard time connecting, learning (and trying to become invested in) logging, and ultimately I wish my connection in the story happened sooner. than the last quarter of the story. Might be a great book club pick with lots to talk about, if you can get past the glacial pacing.