Damnation Spring by Ash DavidsonRead about another entry on the list.
Ash Davidson’s stellar debut novel is set in northern California during the 1970s, in a small logging community that has supported generations of working class families. It’s a book that shares a common thread with the seagoing novels of yore, books about swashbuckling sailors who risked their lives in search of adventure—and the first generation of loggers were sailors who climbed and roped the great trees like masts. But this is also a book about wives and children, and about husbands struggling to squeeze a living out of a dwindling industry. And it’s about one more thing: how our environment defines us and supports us, and how our mistreatment of the world is, in the end, the same as mistreating ourselves. There’s even more to this book, but you get the idea. It’s really good. Surprisingly good. Ash Davidson’s sentences have a gravity all their own that pulls the reader down into the story. And before you know it, you are there—in California redwood country, in 1977, living with people you’ve never thought about or cared about before. I didn’t really want to leave them.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
