What readers think of Damnation Spring, plus links to write your own review.

How does a debut author write a novel so self assured and heavily researched, while highlighting characters and families that are so obviously blemished ? Davidson has done this and more with her quietly empathetic look at loggers ,protestors, and family communication. Rich Gunderson is part of a 4th generation of loggers, and has an opportunity to buy a swath of land to elevate his family's fortune, but does so without telling his wife Colleen. Meanwhile Colleen is painfully distressed having had several miscarriages. What compounds the problem is that she acts as a midwife and has to witness live births and then the sudden escalation of problematic births. When an old boyfriend turns up and tests the waters, he believes the herbicides used in logging are causing these stillbirths and deformities.
Just as coalminers have been asked to leave their precarious jobs from working in the mines and the development of "black lung", this situation portrays the tug and pull of working in an occupation that has been the livelihood for a community's lives with little inability to imagine uprooting and changing their line of work. Tensions between the characters are skillfully drawn producing an environmental astute commentary reflective of the times.
I have to admit that the technicality of the logging terms put me off at first and I found myself not wanting to continue but this is a novel that demands pushing forward.