Damnation Spring

By: Ash Davidson

Narrated by: CJ Wilson, Rebecca Lowman, Mark Sanderlin, Candace Thaxton

National Best Seller

Named a Best Book of 2021 by Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times

“A glorious book - an assured novel that’s gorgeously told.” (The New York Times Book Review)

“An incredibly moving epic about an unforgettable family.” (CBS Sunday Morning)

“[An] absorbing novel. ... I felt both grateful to have known these people and bereft at the prospect of leaving them behind.” (The Washington Post)

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

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.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall - a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son - and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient redwoods. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy and desperate to have a second child, challenges the logging company’s use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict. As tensions in the town rise, they threaten the very thing the Gundersens are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love - between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

©2021 Ash Davidson (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc.

A wonderful story beginning to end.

Just read this book. There are no words I can write to do it justice. You just have to read it yourself.

You don’t find a lot of books like this.

The ending left me with mixed feelings. I wasn’t totally on board with the route she chose BUT I respect the choice; Taken as a whole, this was a damn good book.

I’ve been scouring a lot of environmental fiction lately, and ‘damnation spring’ has been one of my clear favorites (alongside ‘bewilderment’ and ‘American War’). Lots of great authors have taken a shot at apocalyptic (or at the very least dystopian) cli-fi. ‘Damnation Spring’ is far more grounded.

It’s about environmental protection and a toxic torts case straight out of ‘Dark Waters’, but it’s also about family, work, and the struggle to leave a better life for your children. I loved the plot; I loved the setting; I love the characters even more. This was the book I was looking for when I bought ‘Migrations.’ Now, it’s my new gold standard.

just excellent

a simple excellent book with fully realized characters and locale, a story line which evolves in unexpected directions, and excellent voice acting. one od threw best i have read/ listened to all year.

An Unconventional Topic

I enjoyed the human drama behind this tale of the Redwoods in the 70’s, although the specific processes of the industry eluded my limited knowledge of the logging/ timber industry. Too often the authors ended scenes abruptly, and I totally disagreed with two decisions regarding two main characters near the end of the book, but I found the presentation of more than one side of a character or opposing viewpoints to be illuminating.

Great Book!!

I absolutely loved this book. Beautifully written, great story, amazing character development, sweet and heart wrenching at times (in the very best way.) I highly recommend this book!

This book has it all!

Damnation Spring pulls you into the lives of loggers in Northern CA in the 70s. It’s written with the clarity of spring water and reading it was utterly refreshing. This is the story of a close-knit, working class community and the ups and downs of logger’s lives when mixed with the unpredictability of Mother Nature, the government & corporate interests. It focuses heavily on marriage, family, loyalty and how far people will go to protect them. Loved it.

Meh.

While I appreciate Davidson’s attention to detail when it comes to the intricacies of the logging and timber industries, the story itself just wasn’t that interesting. By the end, I couldn’t help but think the book could have been significantly shorter. She spends a lot of time on unnecessary exposition and subplots that aren’t important to the overall narrative. What’s more, the chapters told from the perspective of the little boy felt forced. There are two of three twists toward the end of the book and I’d say two of them felt unearned and uninspired. Still, there is something to be said for the performers. They save what would otherwise be a drab story. If I had picked up the actual physical book, I’m not sure I would have finished it. So yeah, it’s not a bad book per se. I recommended it to a friend who grew up in the region and was familiar with the logging vs. environmentalism outlooks. But I wouldn’t recommend it to a casual reader who was looking for a compelling or thought-provoking read.

A Saga Worth Hearing

This is a very emotional account of corporate America gone awry, and the personal consequences.

Good Book with anti-climatic ending

I enjoyed the narrators but the book itself had a lot of build up to an ending that really fell flat. Without giving up any spoilers; some conflicts that were throughout the book resolved themselves at the end in a really lazy way while at the same time the author added dramatic and suspenseful storylines that lacked substance or any sort of connection with the story or themes.

24/7….

Is how I wanted to listen to this book, it was so good!
It was a novel about family - the goods and the bads. Of remaining family, even in the worst.
An awesome book, well written.