North Woods

I can't even nail down what genre this is, let alone how to talk about it. If you'd asked me two thirds of the way through, I'd have said historical gothic, but ‘sad, sometimes spooky window into the past' doesn't describe it fully, and the ‘Nature as edenic/paradise lost and found=environmental concerns'  seems clear only after I finished the book.  The writing is incredible, the shift in modes of storytelling weaving together an ongoing narrative is an impressive technical feat, while the prose itself is at turns beautiful and wistful,  incendiary and dark. If you can survive the toxic melodrama of chapter three, I think you'll be richly rewarded. I'll think I'll be considering everything this book is and says for a long time.