Damnation Spring
by Ash Davidson
Published by Scribner
on August 3, 2021
Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction
Length: 464 pages

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Synopsis:
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. 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 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. 


My Thoughts:

Damnation Spring is the story of a logging town in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970's that is slowly starting to become aware of the effects of the local logging company's herbicides. 

Rich and Colleen Gunderson are just trying to get by and raise their only son, Chub, after a long string of miscarriages, but when Colleen's old high school sweetheart finds a link between the herbicides and the town's miscarriages and stillbirths, Colleen and Rich must make tougher choices than they've ever made before.


I started this on a whim, going in blind and having only seen one or two random people recommend it, but it was available so I gave it a go. It took me a while to get into the story and I had to switch to audio so my attention wouldn't waver as much. It's a bit slow-paced and not a lot happens beyond some family drama and community hardships. It's much more character-driven and has a heavy focus on politics and the blowback from locals when faced with science and facts that may actually save their lives and end all their woes. 

I recommend if you enjoy environmental reads, familial drama, or historical fiction about logging or the Pacific Northwest. 

Content Warnings 
include
Miscarriage, severe birth defects, death, violence, animal abuse, infidelity