Fiction | Book Chatter

Damnation Spring
By Ash Davidson
Scribner, 9781982144401, August 2021, 464pp.

The Short of It:

Slow build, but worth it in the end.

The Rest of It:

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened. ~ Indiebound

Damnation Spring is about a lot of things. That is why the story is sticking with me even though I finished it a few days ago. Colleen and Rich don’t have the perfect marriage but there’s love there, especially for their young son Chub. But after eight miscarriages, Colleen wants nothing more than to carry a baby to term but there’s a problem. The spray used to control the growth in their logging community is poisoning their water. Colleen, an amateur midwife to the other women in the community has seen the proof of it more than she cares to admit. Babies, born with half a brain, and now her own sister is pregnant.

Colleen’s determination at finding the cause for her miscarriages creates problems for Rich and his logging team. He wants to ignore it but when he looks at his son Chub, he also doesn’t want to endanger his life or Colleen’s. Plus, he has a financial stake in all of this because he purchased a large part of the land, with the hopes to sell the timber but there are challenges there too. Roads, not owned by him. You might own the timber but you can’t get it out if the roads aren’t available to you.

This was a rich, complicated story about people trying to survive. I loved the complexity of the characters. There is a rawness to the story too. The beauty of the timber, the destruction of the forest, the poisoning of the water and everything around it trying so hard to survive. It was very good and I didn’t notice its length at nearly 500 pages.

Recommend.

Source: Review copy provide by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

The Family Plot
By Megan Collins
Atria Books, 9781982163846, August 2021, 320pp.

The Short of It:

The Family Plot is one of those “treat” reads. One that makes you love reading all over again.

The Rest of It:

At twenty-six, Dahlia Lighthouse is haunted by her upbringing. Raised in a secluded island mansion deep in the woods and kept isolated by her true crime-obsessed parents, she is unable to move beyond the disappearance of her twin brother, Andy, when they were sixteen.

After several years away and following her father’s death, Dahlia returns to the house, where the family makes a gruesome discovery: buried in their father’s plot is another body—Andy’s, his skull split open with an ax. ~ Indiebound

Let’s just say that discovering her missing brother’s body in her own backyard is enough to make Dahlia lose all hope in her true-crime obsessed family. Andy was her twin, but he was also everything to her. Basically, the other half of who she was. Losing her brother at the age of sixteen, with his “goodbye” note the only thing left behind, meant that she saw him every time she turned a corner, searched endlessly online for him, and basically lost touch with her two other siblings because they didn’t seem to understand the depth of her loss. They had each other, and she had no one.

When their father dies and they all return home it’s not a happy homecoming at all. Too many memories buried in that house. They were raised by parents who were obsessed with true crime, specifically the local murders which involved many young women, and the killer was never found. Their walls covered with the news of those murders, gruesome pictures and even dioramas that Dahlia’s sister constructed as a way to work through the horror.

When Andy’s body is discovered in their own backyard, Dahlia cannot make sense of it. He’s been gone all this time and yet, he was right there. How did he end up there? Who killed him? Is it related to the other killings on the island?

This was a marvelous read. Fun, twisty, not that predictable. I enjoyed spending time with this quirky family and I could not turn the pages fast enough. I was hoping it would be good but it will probably end up on my fave list at the end of the year. I was happily surprised by how much I loved this one.

Recommend.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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