{Thank you to Scribner Books for my gifted review copy}
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
{My @GenTheBookworm #Bookstagram Discussion of Damnation Spring can be found HERE.}
Publication Date:
August 3rd, 2021
Book Summary:
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.
Genre:
Literary Fiction
Purchase Your Copy:
Book Of The Month Referral Link
My Rating:
5/5 Stars
My Review:
{This photo was also featured on Book of The Month’s Instagram feed, which was quite exciting!}
Damnation Spring is described as “…The the deeply human story of a Pacific Northwest logging town wrenched in two by a mystery that threatens to derail its way of life” – and when I saw it was one of the Book of The Month Club August selections, I was immediately intrigued.
I alternating reading and listening to Damnation Spring (which clocks in at 464 pages) and while my overall reading is slow going right now (thank you Pandemic Fatigue), I found it completely compelling.
It’s a character-driven novel, and I found that author Ash Davidson built her characters so well that I could almost feel their emotions, which is my favorite kind of reading. The intricate premise, focusing on friendship, marriage and how far someone will go to protect their community and way of life made this book both thought provoking and moving.
It’s beautifully and intricately crafted and the environmental issues combined with the deeply human experiences make this an impressive debut novel. I also think it would make a great fall book club discussion because there is just so much to unpack.
Thank you to Scribner Books for my gifted copy. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.
