Such a different book! I love how authors these days, change things up and mix things up creating something beautiful from what could be a mess. This was very well written.

This is a most unusual book; by equal turns fascinating and frustrating. The fascinating part: the author chronicles life on a single plot of land in northern Massachusetts over the course of American history. We meet the inhabitants of this land, both human and non-human (a catamount features prominently and one charming chapter is the story of a beetle living in one of the elm trees), both living and dead. The frustrating part: the author moves from story to story without always clarifying the time setting or the names of the characters until well into the chapter. On the one hand, this forces the reader to see the connections between the inhabitants, but on the other, it is often confusing to trace the relationships from one inhabitant to the next.

A recurring theme in the book is that, although earthly bodies may die, the characters continue to inhabit the farm during the afterlife. Some inhabitants are benevolent, some are not. Some characters report hearing voices or sounds, others do not. A healthy dose of magical realism allows us to see that characters continue to communicate with each other after their earthly life is over (a pair of sisters is the prime example of this).

I'm not sure if the author intended us to come away with the thought that there is a piece of each inhabitant in a property throughout history, or if it is just this particular property that affects its inhabitants. In either case, I'm not completely sold.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

An amazing literary story of home, humans and animals. Vividly described and ambitious. Not for all, but if you are willing to give this book a try you will not be disappointed.

Summer means spending time in nature and reading about the great outdoors. I searched @NetGalley for a few titles, fiction and nonfiction, that suited my mood. Let me know if any of these fit your summer mood.

The Last Ranger by Peter Heller seemed a natural place to start. He writes about the great outdoors with the grace and reverence of someone in awe of the natural world. One can count on Heller to strike a perfect balance between a strong sense of place, dramatic tension, character development and well written prose.)

Ren is a park ranger at Yellowstone charged with breaking up camper disputes, saving clueless tourists from themselves and keeping poachers at bay. The heart of the story revolves around the conflicts that arise between naturalists, hunters and the Yellowstone homesteaders. The action begins when Ren finds his friend Hilly, a wolf biologist, nearly dead with her leg caught in a trap. But was it meant for a wolf or his friend?
(Pub Date: 25 July 2023)

North Woods by Daniel Mason is the story of a place and home in the woods of Massachusetts. It is the story of the people who over the centuries have inhabited the land, called it home and left their imprint. The reader follows the succession of inhabitants who found shelter, sustenance, sanctuary and in some cases captivity.

I was drawn in by the structure of the novel which reads like a story collection centered around the North Woods’ inhabitants. It is layered with explorations of home, family and their relationship to place. (Pub Date: 19 Sep 2023)

Journalist Gloria Dickie‘s Eight is in turns heartbreaking and hopeful. Dickie travels the globe to examine the plight of eight remaining species of bear, from the bile farms of Vietnam to the vanishing ice floes of North America. She meets scientists and conservationists striving to reverse the unparalleled challenges faced by these beautiful creatures. Interweaving history, science, and myth, Dickie speaks to the indelible place bears hold in our culture and warns what we stand to lose if we do not act.
(Pub Date: 11 July 2023)


I’d like to thank @NetGalley, @AAKnopf, @RandomHouse and @WWNorton&Company for the privilege of reading these advanced readers copies.
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What a unique idea, writing about a static place and all the people who inhabit it.

The descriptions are vivid and beautiful. You can smell the grass, and the flowers, and see the ponds and the moss. The author takes us back about 400 years to the first inhabitants of the humble cabin.

A pair of lovers running from a Puritan colony. A soldier who forgets battles to focus on apples, spinsters surviving war and hardship to die of silly things.

The scene is set beautifully and serves as a backdrop for a story of nature and human nature. Each story seems to have a deeper meaning and I loved every minute of this one.

Does anyone else smell a Pulitzer?

NetGalley/ RHPG, September 19, 2023

This enchanting, etherial book will stay with me for a very long time. It is the story of a humble house which over many, many years houses and shelters a diverse set of people all building their stories upon what came before them. First there are the Puritan lovers who escape from their strict sect to live freely in the humble home and worship God the way they want to. There are the Artist and Poet who fall into a forbidden love and whose spirits decide to remain with the house long after they are gone. The apple obsessed retired military man whose relatives think he is crazy to want to plant and produce apples - The Wonder. And his two daughters, the sisters Mary and Alice both obsessed with apples, but in different ways. Even the beetles that make this house a home for their children (larvae) to thrive have a unique story to tell. It is a magical journey of beautiful words, humor, love and the story of a lifetime. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, it is a work of art and a love letter to nature and humanity.

I could not get into this book at all. Needs some additional editing to reduce some of the superfluous language.

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced readers copy of this book.

This book might be subtitled, “What we do for love:” love of place, nature, parents, children, siblings; romantic love and illicit love, platonic and physical.

This remarkable collection of linked stories is told in different voices from different times, with many contemporaneous social and cultural issues explored. These range from colonial settlers in the 17th century, to apple growers in the 18th and the Loyalist perspective in the Revolutionary War, to the slave catcher in mid-19th century, the séance in the early 20th century, and the treatment of mental illness in the mid-20th. There are riddles, ballads, and ghost stories, and writing that seems to come right from the first-hand accounts of captured colonial settlers as well as Victorian authors like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and 1950’s-60’s pulp crime fiction. Bobcats reappear, real, stuffed, and phantom, as do serving girls with almost identical names: Anne, Annie, and Anneli.

North Woods reads like the written equivalent of an old-fashioned zoetrope, a hand-held rotating device in which a strip of slightly different pictures of the same object spin around, creating an impression of change in the image. In North Woods, the place gradually comes into view as the dense forests and mountains of western Massachusetts which first appear as a haven for runaway Puritan lovers, then a sanctuary for a colonial woman kidnapped by Indians, then the site of a famed apple orchard, a dwelling for a run-away slave and her child. It is a home for the nature scenes desired by a Victorian painter, a possible investment for an industrialist, the site for the roamings of a schizophrenic.

Over time the forest is transformed by nature and man, and yet the home site, now a yellow house built in the 1700’s, remains, serving as place for varied epiphanies as it is visited by new people and old ghosts. As the author writes, “The only way to see the world other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

With well-done magic realism, this book captures both loss and change, giving a vivid and thought-provoking perspective on humans and their humanity across time.

Two things can be true at the same time. This book is not my cup of tea, and it will also be on many best of lists for 2023. Mason uses a New England plot of land to tell a 400 year history of humankind, and what we do well and what we do not do well to each other and to the land entrusted to us. 4 stars rounded up for the sheer scope of Mason’s accomplishment. I am confident this book will be talked about a lot this fall. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC.

This was a really unique experience and a read that I greatly enjoyed. I'm not usually a huge fan of "connected stories" or a novel that that jumps around so much in time so that you don't get to spend enough time with each character. However, I did not have that issue with this book. I think that the author did a good job of giving enough attention to each set of characters, and the way that the "spirits" of the historical characters kept popping up throughout subsequent narratives. As a lifelong resident of New England, and someone who works in a library in New England, this is definitely a book that I found incredibly intriguing and I think would appeal to many patrons. I'm going to have to go read some of Mason's backlist because I just thought his writing style was so interesting and unique. I think we got a pretty decent diversity of perspectives, and I liked that we got perspectives from animals, ghosts, inanimate objects, etc. It was a really great read. I would highly recommend!

This is a truly gorgeous novel and one of my favorites of 2023! It's a sweeping, intergenerational story about a plot of land in Massachusetts, which sees many things (houses and people, flora and fauna) come and go over the course of 400 years. (And often inhabitants linger, long after their time there.) The style and structure vary from chapter to chapter, depending on the perspective of the narrator. It's best not to know too much before diving in, so I'll leave it at that.

#StoryGraph: fiction historical literary wilderness adventure
352 pages • first pub 2023 • 4 Stars

North Woods is a very imaginative and informative novel that begins with a couple who move from their Puritan community to live in solitude in a woodland cabin. It took a few chapters to draw me into the story but once it hooked me, it was like claws digging in. This is a complex saga that follows the cycles of nature, people, and wildlife and how they relate to their environment and to each other. The book is written in sections that follow every month and every season. Makes me want to read The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

A literary micro-history of New England, Daniel Mason's North Woods uses one cabin as a springboard to explore America's evolving identity.

Beginning with a Puritan couple, Mason seamlessly weaves together fictionalized versions of familiar events. After the Puritans, a captivity narrative (that ends a la Hannah Duston), and a Johnny Appleseed, exploring the expansionist and "civilizing" ideologies of the early US empire. Later, the one-sided love letters between two 19th-century transcendental artists (a poet and a painter) should feel familiar to anyone who has read Melville's letters to Hawthorne. The story progresses through the 20th-century and the present day, tying each of these stories to their specific context and to each other. Mason has developed a fascinating and intricately wrought romp through New England's literary past and the history that informed it.

I could see this novel pairing well with other readings in my American lit classroom!

Fantastic, brilliant, inventive, and thoroughly affecting. Set over about 400 years, in the woods of western Massachusetts, in the town that becomes Oldfield, it centers mostly on a particular house there, beginning in the French and Indian Wars, through the Revolution, late 1800s, 1945, up to about 2019, told through the lives of those who inhabit the house, the woods, build on the house, tend an apple orchard, paint the trees and mushrooms, the life events that happen there, the weather, environment, the trees, the beetles, as well as the ghosts who once dwelt there in their lives. Told in narrative, but also in letters from an English soldier to his daughters, in letters between a painter and a poet, in songs, in poems about a cougar, in a true-crime article. Truly masterful, utterly absorbing. I read it straight through in a day and it's been a long time since I have been so completely enamored by a novel. I'd say this will be a novel of 2023 and beyond, and will win quite a lot of awards.

Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for an ARC.

Daniel Mason's beautiful landscape descriptions are captivating. This "historical fiction" novel should be savored, not rushed. Enjoy the journey!

4.5 stars for this one, but rounding up for sheer scope and beauty. This is an ephemeral novel; you're constantly between time periods (ranging from 400 years ago to the near future) with characters who may or may not exist in the world of the living. It takes a long time to get through and is occasionally confusing, but the recurring theme of the house in the woods and surrounding apple orchard is the thread that unites the whole. Perfect for a cottagecore rainy fall evening when you want to be transported to the woods of western Massachusetts.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this advance copy!

Well this was a lovely, if a little long, collections of stories linked through a single property. It was not the kind of book you rush through, but one you might pick up and read a little each night. I lost track of all the connections between characters and who might be real or who might be a ghost, but the setting and language and world building was exquisite.

Two reasons drove my interest in this title. First, I have read other works by the author, and loved the storylines. Second, I grew up in this area, and the ski slopes on the Massachusetts-New York border were some of my favorites, with one actually named “Catamount”. This is a sprawling delight covers the 400 years of life experienced by the people and the wooded mountains ion which they live. Over the course of time, the mountain and its people thrive or die, kill or murder. Forests are replaced by orchards, then destroyed by storms or bark beetles. The simple stone cottage of the Puritan couple becomes a yellow cottage which is expanded with each new occupant, before gradually falling into disrepair. It is a cycle of growth, decline, death and regrowth with the characters sometime leaving bits of their story behind, to be discovered in the future, and occasionally their spirit stays. Highly recommend.
Thank you Random House and NetGalley for the digital arc.

I honestly don't know what to say about this book. Some of it I really liked and other parts I found totally confusing. It starts out wirh a piece of land near a forest, an apple tree and the building of a yellow cabin in the woods.
So many stories, so many families, so many deaths,so many loves lost and hearts broken when jealousy enters the mind.
I loved all of the beauty described in the forest, what the apple tasted like with that first bite.
This yellow home abandoned, then cleaned up, abandoned and new family comes. Thw ghosts of the past mixing with tge families of the future. Dead bodies long buried, found. I did like this book to a certain extent. The writing was beautiful and confusing at the same time. This book will probably win an award, based on the writting alone. I give it a 3.5 out-of 5.

This book was absolutely stunning! I have not stopped thinking about it since starting. The premise instantly captivated me. I loved how the stories flowed and felt connected despite the varying styles and structures. I could see myself rereading this if only to enjoy the author's beautiful descriptions of the landscape.