Extremely unusually for me, I bought this book on Kindle practically sight unseen. I am an inveterate reader of other readers' reviews, as well as an inveterate guarder of my money, and so others' reviews always influence whether or not I'll buy a book. With "North Woods," I read merely the editors' description (the fact that the book had been shortlisted for the Pulitzer in fiction certainly didn't hurt, nor did the very interesting cover, which looks like 300-year-old folk art) and just thought immediately "Yep, I wanna read this."
If I hadn't loved this book so much, I don’t think I'd have even attempted to review it here, because it is almost impossible to review it without oversimplying it ... and oversimplification would be a grave disservice to the truly "holy s..t wow" I felt on reading this book, start to finish.
For example, I believe it would be an oversimplification to say "North Woods" is only about a house and the generations of people who live in it over the centuries. Yes, on the surface, it is about that ... a pre-Colonial stone cabin in western Massachusetts, initially, the face of which changes over the decades, as do its inhabitants. We have the rebellious young out-of-wedlock Puritan couple escaping the establishment ... the house's nearest next incarnation, which sees a bloody and fatal conflict between English colonists and Native Americans later in the 18th century (with a fundamentally unforgettable image of vegetative growth in the presence of death which sets the stage for the rest of the book, both literally and figuratively) ... next, a former and future Tory soldier who envisions and sees come to pass an orchard ... the twin spinster daughters left to harvest or destroy his vision ... later, a literary romanticist/naturalist who yearns for a love not socially acceptable in his time ... and later in the house's history, a deeply troubled young man billed as a schizophrenic but whose connection with the property may be more than meets the eye ... and further into the years, other characters with other connections to the house and its surrounding property.
Each of these characters inhabits the book's narrative for a short period of time, brilliantly underscoring the ephemeral nature of the passage of time and human lifetimes in it. Because to understand this novel as merely a human story would be to fundamentally misunderstand it -- as we also see over the course of the centuries the elements of nature which grow, change, and leave their mark on the property, in glowing and gorgeous imagery. In a beautifully rendered narrative
of the natural world, we meet beetles and
see mushrooms. We foresee what is wrought by an imbalance in nature, in real time yet in the past. We see towering chestnuts and elms which will someday be decimated by blight. We see flocks of passenger pigeons numerous enough to darken the skies, but which the novel's central "yellow house" will see go extinct. We see a mountain lion(s) in eras where that cat had been long since thought to have been extirpated from the region, and we later see it in taxidermied form in this same house. All of these forces, human and non, make their appearances on the book's stage in ways that are thought provoking and, impressively, never heavy-handed. We see humans taking control, nature taking it back, and the constant interplay of this struggle until, at the very end, we get the eerie impression that the narrative has jumped beyond the present time and into a future we haven't yet experienced.
And yes, equally subtly (to the point I admit I did have to reread certain passages more than once to be sure I understood), the supernatural does begin to appear halfway or so through the book, and at this point, "North Woods" becomes a ghost story both sweet and savory. And while this may have been off-putting or unexpected to some readers, in my reading, it works, and wonderfully underscores the dynasty of this property and the interconnectedness of all living things which live, grow, fall back, creep forward, die, and then ultimately continue to live upon it, even after their corporeal forms have ceased to exist.
It is unfortunate that the reviewer who read, by the sounds of the review, perhaps 15 pages of the book, and called it racist because of a historically accurate depiction of 17th century English colonial views toward Native Americans. Should a character living in the 17th century have spoken or thought like someone from the 21st? That certainly wouldn't make for very accurate historical fiction. Why make a sweeping generalization of a several-hundred-pages long book after admittedly reading only a tiny part of it? Rhetorical...
In the meantime, highest praise from this humble reader. "North Woods" will stick with me for a long time.
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Alice watched the old man and felt a kinship with someone who had learned to untether part of himself and let it roam, while the rest of him was bound by circumstance.Highlighted by 694 Kindle readers- Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness.Highlighted by 614 Kindle readers
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North Woods by Daniel Mason
Penguin Random House LLC
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Fantastic book with unique format
This book is fantastic and I loved it! The format was perfectly unique. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I finished it.Heads up though - I found the first 10ish% a bit hard to get into, but once I got over that first hump I was sucked in.This whole book revolves around a house in the woods through generations and years. I absolutely love that the house is the main character and the story evolves along with the home. I’m a sucker for a unique premise and it delivers.The inhabitants include a man obsessed with growing the perfect apple, spinster twins who become wildly jealous, a man convinced it would make a perfect hunting lodge, a runaway slave ready to outsmart a bounty hunter, a true crime reporter who finds a mass grave, a lovesick painter, and several more. Each inhabitant’s story is great on its own, but they all connect all call back to one another through the years and through the house.It’s gorgeously written and the ending is stunning.Y’all them twins though. And that BEETLE. Gasp. IYKYK.
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Top reviews from other countries
prairiegirl
Excellent book! Couldn't put it down.
Reviewed in Canada on April 20, 2024
Dr. Alexander Laub
Geschichte um eine Hütte in den Bergen durch Jahrhunderte hindurch
Reviewed in Germany on November 1, 2023