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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2021, 464 pages
Paperback:
May 2022, 464 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Elisabeth Herschbach
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An epic, immersive debut, Damnation Spring is the deeply human story of a Pacific Northwest logging town wrenched in two by a mystery that threatens to derail its way of life.
For generations, Rich Gundersen's family has chopped a livelihood out of the redwood forest along California's rugged coast. Now Rich and his wife, Colleen, are raising their own young son near Damnation Grove, a swath of ancient redwoods on which Rich's employer, Sanderson Timber Co., plans to make a killing. In 1977, with most of the forest cleared or protected, a grove like Damnation—and beyond it 24-7 Ridge—is a logger's dream.
It's dangerous work. Rich has already lived decades longer than his father, killed on the job. Rich wants better for his son, Chub, so when the opportunity arises to buy 24-7 Ridge—costing them all the savings they've squirreled away for their growing family—he grabs it, unbeknownst to Colleen. Because the reality is their family isn't growing; Colleen has lost several pregnancies. And she isn't alone. As a midwife, Colleen has seen it with her own eyes.
For decades, the herbicides the logging company uses were considered harmless. But Colleen is no longer so sure. What if these miscarriages aren't isolated strokes of bad luck? As mudslides take out clear-cut hillsides and salmon vanish from creeks, her search for answers threatens to unravel not just Rich's plans for the 24-7, but their marriage too, dividing a town that lives and dies on timber along the way.
Told from the perspectives of Rich, Colleen, and Chub, in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, this intimate, compassionate portrait of a community clinging to a vanishing way of life amid the perils of environmental degradation makes Damnation Spring an essential novel for our time.
Rich
He lay for a moment, Colleen's arm draped over him, heavy with sleep: three thirty a.m. on the dot, his body its own alarm clock. He held his breath, trying to slip free without waking her, but the moment his feet touched rug, she sat up. He groaned, getting his shirt on. His back ached from carrying Chub up to the 24-7 yesterday.
"Want me to walk on it?" Colleen asked.
"Maybe tonight."
He rolled his shoulder, laced up his boots. Out back, he let Scout off his chain and loped up the hill after him, into the white dark. His headlamp turned fog to gold. His heart knocked at his ribs. Like some young buck sneaking off to the joyhouse.
I'll think about it, he'd promised Jim Mueller. True to his word, Rich had thought of little else. The kitchen light glowed in the fog behind him, Colleen getting the percolator going, cracking eggs, dropping store bread into the toaster. She wanted another kid so bad it hurt to look at her. He longed to tell her, to roll the plan he'd been drawing up in...
A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Davidson was born in the region where Damnation Spring takes place, and her familiarity with the area shows in the way she brings her setting to life with vivid details that evoke a strong sense of place. Pitch-perfect dialogue makes her characters feel real, and intricate depictions of the logging industry deftly convey the realities of living and working in timber country. Davidson is particularly adept at writing about the natural environment. Lush descriptions capture the magic of the landscape...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).
Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
In her astonishingly accomplished first novel, Ash Davidson reminds us that we are never more profoundly shaped by our environment than when we destroy it. Nearly every page left me in awe.
In Ash Davidson's Damnation Spring, residents in a sparsely populated Northern California logging enclave in the late 1970s face a disturbing epidemic of miscarriages, stillbirths, birth defects and other ailments linked to the local timber company's use of herbicide sprays. While the specific location, people and events chronicled in the book are fictional, Davidson's inspiration comes from real-life events that occurred in Northwest logging communities such as the Alsea Valley on the central Oregon coast, site of the Siuslaw National Forest and extensive tracts of privately owned timberland.
Like the characters in Damnation Spring, Alsea residents began noticing a proliferation of miscarriages and birth defects in the 1970s, including...
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