Damnation Spring
Ratings12
Average rating3.8
NATIONAL BESTSELLER Named a Best Book of 2021 by Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times “A glorious book—an assured novel that’s gorgeously told.” —The New York Times Book Review “An incredibly moving epic about an unforgettable family.” —CBS Sunday Morning “[An] absorbing novel…I felt both grateful to have known these people and bereft at the prospect of leaving them behind.” —The Washington Post A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future. 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. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy and desperate to have a second child, challenges the logging company’s use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict. As tensions in the town rise, they threaten the very thing the Gundersens 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.
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Oof. This was good.
First of all, massive content warning for pregnancy/infant loss. If this is a topic you struggle to read about, this book is absolutely not for you.
Rich and Colleen Gundersen live in the redwood forest where Rich is a fourth-generation logger. Colleen is a midwife of sorts, helping local women give birth. It's clear that the people in this area live in poverty, and are very dependent on the logging company not only for jobs but also for free food, subsidized healthcare, etc. Through the everyday lives of various people, you get a sense of issues like environmentalism, tribal rights, poisonous herbicides, forest preservation/stewardship - there are many factions fighting over the future use of the land.
The writing in this book is immersive - the author describes sights, sounds, smells and does it well enough that you feel you are there in the redwood forest. I also appreciated the focus on daily life and mundane activities, as this offered insight into characters' feelings and motivations.
I don't want to say much more for fear of spoilers, but this book would be great for book clubs as there is a wealth of topics to spark discussion.
Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.
I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. (via Netgalley)
I struggled to get into this. The writing was kind of dense and disjointed at times. I found myself having to re-read parts to understand what exactly was going on. Also felt like more action happened in the last 25% of the book which may have contributed to me having a hard time getting into it.
2.5 ⭐
I wanted to like this book so bad. It seemed like just the type of book I would enjoy, but it just didn't do it for me.
I disliked most of the characters in this book with the exception of a few. However, everything happening to them was just so incredibly sad and just seemed to drag on so long. Colleen didn't even begin to realize what was going on until around 200 pages in. Everything before this point was preparing you for the actual story which never got fully resolved before the end of the book.
