North Woods

Wow. Just wow. I loved this book despite my not thinking I would. I became so caught up in the lives of the humans and the nature around them. The last 2 chapters blew me away with the beauty of the writing (although the whole book is beautifully written--I just happened to love those chapters the best). The last line is perfection.

This novel is a genre bender. Or maybe it would be better to say it has some of almost every genre in it. It has prose narrative from almost every perspective, in different styles, from a doctor's case notes to true crime tabloid, and plenty of third person omniscient that flows along so seamlessly that you might forget that you are reading as you are mesmerized by the stories of a house on a plot of land in the western Massachusetts woodlands and the succession of people (and animals and insects) who lived there over the years since colonization. There is poetry, song, photography, thwarted romance, and an unabashed ghost story. Some of this sits together a little awkwardly. When you start to get comfortable in one section of the book, look out, because you are about to be unseated and it may take you a while to settle in again. I found the end pulled everything together for me, though, so the disparate parts made a convincing, beautiful, slightly melancholy whole.

It's Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory. A collection of connected short stories, spanning 3 centuries, centred around a yellow house deep in the woods of Massachusetts incorporating diary entries, letters, songs, poems, medical notes and more, written by young lovers escaping puritanical judgement, a Loyalist soldier struck with pomomania, a buxom fortune teller, a slave hunter, a schizophrenic, twin spinsters, a disgraced amateur historian, a closeted painter and plenty of ghosts beside. Throw in the smutty goings on of a horny scolytid beetle, the thwarted efforts of an industrious squirrel preparing for winter, a spore shaken from the coat of a dog, and various mountain lions. Not to mention various folks axed, eviscerated, and blown away. Each chapter is written in accordance to the time and narrator, from the prim prose of the late 18th century, the florid letters from a 19th century painter, to the lurid exclamations of a 70's true crime writer.

[Deep breath] It's a lot, and yet Mason somehow manages to pull it off and land this thing. It is pure storytelling magic where all that is asked of you is to revel in the magic of the words on the page. Not a bad side hustle when Mason isn't busy teaching psychiatry at Stanford. #showoff

The concept was interesting – I love thinking of the changes of people and experiences and time occurring over one piece of land. I enjoyed some of the stories, especially the first ones. I skimmed other sections, not as engaged in those stories. It seemed a bit like the concept was more important than having the reader feel a part of the story, hence my 3 stars.

This was a fun and thought-provoking read. As a historian, I especially appreciate the way the stories ask you to consider history all around us and the difficulty of reclaiming it. I was not expecting the the spectral characters, but I liked them. Since I listened to this book, and there were so many interconnected story lines, I am tempted to get the hard copy (or e-book) to read again. I'm looking forward to a discussion with my book club.

I enjoyed this book overall, but since it is really a series of vignettes I didn’t feel like there was anything really compelling to drive me through reading. I overall really enjoyed most of the stories and the callbacks to earlier characters in later chapters. The final two chapters were the least compelling for me