Librarian Andrea Nelson recommends North Woods by Daniel Mason.
…And now for something completely different.
~Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1971
It’s difficult to capture the essence of Daniel Mason’s North Woods in a single book review. Never before have I read a book as impossible to pigeonhole as this brilliant, multi centennial saga inspired by the crumbling stone remains of a long-gone New England house.
When North Woods arrived at our library in 2023, the first thing that jumped out at me was its strange cover art. It is hard to look away from the over-saturated drawing of a “catamount” lounging on a hillside. There is a strangely human quality about its face, and the perspective is all wrong. It could be the cover of a children’s book on apex predators. There, half buried in a pile of intriguing new library arrivals, North Woods all but shouted, “Look at me! I am different!”
Invoking “librarian’s privilege,” I snatched it up and began flipping through the pages before it even hit the shelves. What I found was a visual Easter egg hunt. Small, archival treasures peeked out from between the chapters. Faded pencil drawings perch off-center on otherwise blank pages, grainy antique photos of long-gone forest scenes, old-fashioned poems and ballads, odd proverbs, a sheet of music, a page from a Farmer’s Almanac, a hand drawn map, news clippings…
Daniel Mason clearly liberated these little bits of history from dusty Massachusetts archival files while doing his book research. He uses them to signal the passage of time and transition between his storylines. It is refreshing, to say the least– this use of multimedia. It draws the eye to the book like beads woven between the scenes of a pictorial tapestry, adding texture to the book’s astonishing, genre-defying originality.
Without a doubt, North Woods is something completely different.
Pulitzer Price Finalist Daniel Mason is a master of literary voice. Fittingly, the novel begins in elated, almost musical prose, capturing the spirit of two young lovers fleeing their oppressive Puritan colony to brave life together in the wilderness. Their joyful escape takes them deep into the wooded foothills in Western Massachusetts, an area now called the Berkshires. The brave couple could not have imagined that for over four hundred years to follow, the sun-dappled forest clearing they chose for their home would shelter generations of future families, adventurers, villains, artists, sheep, a cougar, and an ever-growing cast of resident ghosts.
As in life, the book begins with beauty and hope, but the decades march on. The house in the North Woods sees residents come and go, nurturing brand-new dreams, facing daunting challenges, and enduring a panoply of tragic losses, bitter feuds, intriguing mysteries, transcendental love and searing heartbreak.
These are the things that define humanity. Perhaps in the North Woods, these things remain after mortality ends, swirling like mist among the stone ruins that dot the New England landscape. As any New Englander can tell you, every mossy, vine-covered, stone relic has a story to tell.
Whether the protagonist is an elderly British soldier in search of the perfect wild apple tree, or a giddy chestnut blight spore tumbling and dancing on the wind, each chapter of North Woods perfectly reflects the tone of its human or non-human protagonists’ personality. Daniel Mason catapults his readers from a poetic, whimsical story of young love to the violent realism of historical fiction during the bloody French and Indian Wars… and that’s only in the first two chapters. Expect a little whiplash! Some chapters read like psychological thrillers, burning with jealousy, axe murders, passion, deceit, and thwarted love. Others provide comic relief. Some are deliciously spooky, full-on embracing the haunted house sub-genre, while others teach us forestry, entomology, and the pros and cons of importing Spanish sheep. One particularly steamy chapter reads like an excerpt from a romance novel hot enough to make Helen Huang blush—and its two lust-struck protagonists are none other than Scolytid beetles.
Many colorful characters pass through the house in the North Woods over time. An evil southern bounty hunter tracks an escaped slave there, a psychiatrist visits a tragic mother and her schizophrenic son, an escaped convict, a true crime journalist, and an obsessive, disgraced member of the Historical Society of Western Massachusetts all add to its mosaic. Finally, more than four hundred years after the young lovers fled their Puritan colony, a young graduate student travels to the clearing hoping to study spring ephemerals that grow near the now barely visible ruins of the old, forgotten homestead.
I won’t spoil the end for you, but I assure you, you are in for a wild ride.
Find in print, CD, ebook, and eAudiobook in our Collection here.
North Woods is the selection for The Community Library’s Book Club on Wednesday, October 2, 2024, at 5:30 p.m. More here.
