I was bored from start to finish. I kept going hoping it would improve. It didn't.
If you like fantasy fiction you may enjoy it. Descriptions of passion and sex read as if they had been written by a prudish teenager with no relevant experience.
An immature work. ( )

I really enjoyed this, diffused and variably paced as it was. It's a place saga, set on one piece of property in Western Massachusetts, from American settler times to the present, telling its stories as it changes hands. They're all very different, in tone as well as players, and most are engaging, often moving, funny, sometimes surprising in delightful ways. Most of the set pieces landed really nicely, and I actually liked how Mason wove in a thread of the supernatural—I'm not always a fan of such things in an otherwise realist book, but these fit naturally, the way you have at least one friend who bona fide believes in ghosts or astrology and it doesn't make them particularly weird, it's just their thing. Plus the setting and a lot of the history lined up with my personal likings, so that was a winner. Long book, but it goes by quickly, like a river tour where you get out every mile or two to visit what's on shore. Very worth diving in. ( )

I am in awe of Mason's talent. Each chapter was in a different voice, yet there was some relationship among all of them. There was beetle porn, songs, bestiality, murder, love, art and more. What struck me was how when a character's desires/self was suppressed, they suffered incredibly. What prevailed? Despite the best efforts of our flawed, boorish species, nature survived, altered and red in tooth and claw. ( )

Story of a solitary house in New England told through the eyes of those who inhabit it accross the centuries. Very well written story for lovers of woods and nature. ( )

North Woods by Daniel Mason was a very different yet interesting read, almost like a short story collection where there are connections between characters. The whole story takes place at the setting of a yellow house in the woods of Western Massachusetts, and each section of the book carries through with a different family that live there. So we start with a couple that ran away from their Puritan parents , then an Indian kidnapping of a white girl and her release years later to the same woman that ran away. Many many characters, including a man who develops an apple orchard and a woman who sees homosexual ghosts and calls for a medium to come talk to the dead. But throughout these generations, the house remains, becoming a character as well. Mason does a wonderful job describing the local fauna, and the growth and decimation of various kinds of trees, even goes so far as to describe how a random beetle hits upon a certain kind of tree and leads to the destruction of the chestnut trees. In total the lesson here is change. NPR: North Woods manages, impressively, to balance both the narrow and the long view, intimately focusing on the lives of each of the house's inhabitants, yet expansively encompassing American history, natural history, and the relentless march of time and the cycle of the seasons…. "The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change."
One of the most interesting passages of time describes the growth of the apple seed.
"Now, in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat and drops a root into the soil, lifts a pair of pale green cotyledons. A shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man's meager heart."
To some readers, trying to go back and find the connections between generations of characters may be a difficult, but I've always loved tracing character connections. I have to say reading in a kindle allows you to simply touch the name and search for all instances that it appears. Finally there is also a lot of American history to be learned as well.
Highly recommend and will look forward to reading some of Mason's other works.

Lines
Mica dusted her heels like silver. Damselflies upon her neck. Flying squirrels in the trees above them, and in the silty sand the great tracks of cats.

“Out here, no one tears down anyway—one just adds upon, agglutinates, house to house, shed to shed, like some monstrous German noun.”

Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness

From there, according to the map, a road should have taken her into the mountains, but the asphalt soon gave way to dirt, dead-ending at a long driveway flanked by those twin heralds of American hospitality, Private Property and Beware of Dog.”

I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves; when the beeches are green but the birch leaves have fallen; when the oaks tint to the color of ripe apricots and the beeches yellow; when the oaks turn a cigar brown and the beeches curl up into crispy copper rolls. And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just “autumn”!”

Still, I was an old man of fifty when I came to this place, and no great beauty. Time had creased my brow, garlanded my chin with several companions, and furred both ear and nostril generously against the cold.” ( )