Reviews with content warning for Violence - Damnation Spring

Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson

15 reviews

lisas_bookshelf's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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beccaj11's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

The writing is beautiful, but the book moves slowly for a while. It’s a heavy story with a lot of loss and grief, but the magnified look at a marriage under hardship and a town deeply rooted in its history was incredibly well done. What stopped me from giving this 4.5 or 5 stars? A truly devastating ending that I found completely unnecessary. This book has so much heaviness baked into it and just as the sun starts to shine through, it is torn apart again and honestly, it made me so mad. This writer is an incredibly talented storyteller and scene painter, but I will never forgive them for that ending.

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bookswithmybulldog's review against another edition

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dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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adriso's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional funny informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

The way that this story brought the reader along the entire journey through all the twists and turns of life was nearly cinematic. The pace gave me a lot of time to warm up to the characters and inevitably love them all even through their flaws and challenges. It was an entirely emotional and vivid experience to read this novel and I loved almost every second of it.

It was relatable, funny, and heartbreaking till the end, and I completely unraveled towards the end. It felt like I came crashing down with the characters durring their greif and heartache.<spoiler/> This is the type of book I would spend months on and appreciate all the time I invest in it.

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hollybearhouck's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

A slow burn, one that brought me to tears multiple times.

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her_little_library's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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keepreadingbooks's review

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challenging emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

So, this book. I loved it. It’s best described as Migrations, but in the past and with trees (that’s not an apt description at all, but it’s what I’ve got), and – for once – we see the environmental story through the eyes of the “bad guys”, the loggers harvesting old-growth redwoods in 1970s California. I loved it much more than I did a book like The Overstory, which did the opposite and focused on the ones fighting to save what can be saved of our forests and should have been right up my alley, but it became mightily preachy for me, and that’s not my thing. My thing is morally grey characters, a narrative emphasising the fact that the world is rarely, if ever, black and white. And that’s what Damnation Spring does to absolute perfection. Was it conflicting rooting for a guy who plans to harvest a grove of ancient redwood trees? Yes. Did I simultaneously hope he would be able to do it, while also hoping he could make money some other way? Yes. But oh, isn’t it marvellous how stories like this can broaden our minds and make us see things from a new perspective, forcing us to acknowledge the people on the other side?

Some have criticised the heavy use of logger lingo in this book. For me, though, it felt natural. Some things I didn’t quite understand, but that’s okay, the context did the job, and in my view it didn’t hurt the story at all. On the contrary, it painted a pretty good picture of a community of people who live and breathe logging, who know every single detail of the job and of the environment they live in, because that’s what they’ve been doing for generations, and that’s what’s keeping them alive. In all honesty, it would have felt unnatural if a book like this wasn’t littered with logging slang.

It’s a fairly slow book, especially the first 150 pages, but I love this kind of slow. The characterisation is excellent, the plot builds and develops intriguingly, it’s suspenseful, gritty, vivid, educational, timely, beautiful, heart-breaking all in one. It’s a story of man’s havoc-wreaking ways, of greed and desire, of community, for better and worse, and not least of a family and its hardships.

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