A review by keepreadingbooks
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson

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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