What readers think of North Woods, plus links to write your own review.

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, 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.

The North Woods gradually comes into view as the dense forests and mountains of western Massachusetts. Over time the forest is transformed by nature and man, and yet the home site, 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.”

This book captures both loss and change, giving a vivid and thought-provoking perspective on humans and their humanity across time

American novelist and doctor Daniel Mason is already well known for his wonderfully atmospheric historical novels The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier. North Woods sees him explore innovative approaches to historical fiction, and even surpasses those earlier books. The narrative begins in the 1760s and continues through to the present day – and then moves further into some undated moment in the future. It tells the story of a “remote station of the north woods” in Massachusetts, and a lemon-yellow house with a tall black door that is built in this “hilly, snow-dusted country” which lies towards “sun’s fall”.

“North Woods” is a hodgepodge narrative, brazenly disjointed in time, perspective and form. Letters, poems and song lyrics, diary entries, medical case notes, real-estate listings, vintage botanical illustrations, pages of an almanac, modern-day nature photographs, a true-crime detective story, an address to a historical society: Mason stuffs all this (and more!) into his bulging scrapbook of a novel. That “North Woods” proves captivating despite its piecemeal structure is testament to Mason’s powers as a writer, his stylish and supple narrative voice.

The novel lives in its oddments, arrayed for us by an author-collector well versed in pre-modern fruit farming, folk medicine and popular songs through the ages. And language. Mason sprinkles early chapters with archaic words (“higgler,” “pippin,” “paradiddles,” “flams”), and his ear for antique idioms is pitch-perfect. Osgood recalls the rowdy crew he assembled to help him clear land, decrying their “drunkenness and villainy” and lamenting that “no iron fist could stay such ruffians forever.” A few chapters (and half a century) later, a traveling Boston gentleman observes, about New England country homes, that “out here, no one tears down — one just adds upon, agglutinates, house to house, shed to shed, like some monstrous German noun.” By the time the 2020s roll around, at novel’s end, we have received an edifying tour of the history of American speechways.
Grandiose plans, vehement loves, crass betrayals and shocking transgressions play out in this house. In one of the most affecting segments, the property falls in the 1830s to a landscape painter, William Henry Teale, whose letters to his friend, a renowned writer, hint at an affection that exceeds the bounds of acceptability, and point toward a crushing regret.

Mason hits notes of comedy as well. When a local medical practitioner ministers to the young Osgood, prescribing the inhaling of rancid sheep milk to cure his apple mania (Mason, himself a trained physician, knows the history of quackery), the boy observes that “it is not mad to think of fruit.” To which his brother responds: “Sniff, man.”

Across nearly 400 pages we get involved in each of these lives, then move on; the only abiding players in this drama of ineluctable transformation are Nature and Time. Mason maintains a naturalist’s focus on flora and fauna, on the dissolution of bodies and on biological processes as seasons yield to years and to centuries. In one whimsical passage, the erotic entanglement of a vacationing couple before a cabin fireplace in 1956 is juxtaposed with the “sex romps” of two scolytid beetles, described in hilarious detail — “What perfume! Threo-4-methyl-3-heptanol! Alpha-multistriatin!” Their larvae are lodged in the bark of the firewood that the couple bring with them, carrying a malignant spore that in time will kill all the chestnut trees around the yellow house.

From this profusion Mason draws narrative intricacies I can only nod at here. A Bible belonging to a Black family in Canada, a letter written by an anonymous Native American captive, a box of home movies, old bones surfacing in the mud of spring. Documents, artifacts and stories recur across centuries, creating dramatic ironies and invoking ghosts both metaphorical and literal. How to describe Mason’s sui generis fiction? Think of E.L. Doctorow crossed with Wendell Berry, then graced with a Nabokovian predilection for pattern, puzzle and echo.

"North Woods," penned by a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of "The Piano Tuner" and "The Winter Soldier," unfolds as a sweeping tale that spans centuries, intricately woven around a single house in the New England woods. The narrative follows a succession of inhabitants, from young lovers escaping a Puritan colony to an English soldier turning his back on glory for the pursuit of apples. The diverse characters, including spinster twins, a crime reporter, a lovelorn painter, and even a stalking panther, contribute to a rich tapestry of history, nature, and literature.

The novel's exploration of memory and fate resonates as each character confronts the mysteries of the North Woods. The seasonal structure, divided into the twelve months of the year, promises a unique and immersive storytelling experience. The interconnectedness of individuals across time, language, and space adds a magical quality to the narrative, highlighting the enduring ties between people and their environment. "North Woods" appears to be an unforgettable journey through secrets and fates, posing the timeless question of how we live on, even after we're gone.

North Woods by Daniel Mason is a compelling and thrilling book to read. It centers on Charlie, a young man who travels to the Pacific Northwest and discovers inner resilience in the face of a cruel and brutal environment. Mason deftly conveys the enigma and beauty of the natural world while maintaining an engaging and approachable narrative.

Mason creates vivid, exquisite prose and accurately embodies his characters. He expertly weaves together the themes of survival, bravery, and fate to craft an engrossing story. The tone and dialogue are skillfully written and appealing to readers of different genres.

North Woods by Daniel Mason is a highly recommended imaginative historical fiction, but with a different point of reference.

This is a novel about all the lives that lived in a single house in the woods of New England. The novel consists of twelve stories that tie into the seasons and months of the year, all set around the land and house, beginning with two young Puritan lovers who escaped from their colony. Residents also include in part, an English soldier who wants an apple orchard, twin sisters, a landscape painter, the wealthy Farnsworths, and subsequently their daughter and her schizophrenic son, Robert, and a true crime writer.

This is also the story of the land, animals, insects, spores, etc., and the changes experienced over the years. Finally, it is a ghost story, where the former inhabitants may still be haunting the area. Included within the narrative at different points are also folk ballads, letters, diary entries, real estate listing, and accounts of nature's changes, seeds, blights and insects coming to the land. Taken in totality, it all culminates in a tale of how all things in a specific environments are interconnected over time.

The quality of the writing is simply gorgeous and undeniably compelling. The writing will pull you in and keep you reading, however, as with any collection of interconnected stories, not all stories will be as compelling as others throughout the whole novel. The structure and decision to tell a story in this manner, over decades and through different characters on one piece of land, is interesting yet also challenging. I was not especially interested in all the characters and ghosts, however I kept reading for the little gems within the writing.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Random House via NetGalley.

I wanted to like this, I really did. I never connected with the characters or the story and I’m not sure why not. It was a struggle for me to finish. With all the great reviews I’m sure I missed something.

I loved some threads, like the creepy twins, the slave catcher, the gay artist. And yet I was bored by other chapters and just weirded out by the beetle sex thread! I could see the brilliance of the writing, yet felt like some of it was a tad pretentious. And I wondered why author skipped over the post civil war era completely? Interesting book that I think would definitely provide book clubs with tons of discussion!