Finished: Damnation Spring (Ash Davidson) One of the best books I've read this year! Heartwarming, heartbreaking, visceral and so real. It is the story of lifelong logger, Rich, his wife, Colleen, and their five year old son, Chub, who in 1977 live and work in a small logging community on the northern California coast. Rich's father, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on, were all loggers, his father dying on the job when Rich was just a boy. Colleen is a lifelong resident who grew up with her parents and sister in a small cabin, her father a fisher and not a logger. Colleen and Rich are a true love story of being committed to each other, loving each other, arguing with each other, forgiving each other, joking with each other, and loving their son. Tragically, Colleen has had eight miscarriages in the years they've been married, the most recent being a baby girl lost at 22 weeks. They are both devastated and reeling. Colleen is desperate to have another baby, and Rich is now desperate not to get her pregnant again and watch her go through another loss. Meanwhile, Rich goes to work every day for the Sanderson company who does all the logging and milling of the forest in the area. When Sanderson's and the state's relentless spraying of pesticides in the area coincides with the protests from the naturalists who are against all the trees being cut down AND with what suddenly becomes a horrific number of birth defects in new born babies in the community, morals and responsibilities and generations of pride in being loggers and providing for their families come to blows. Colleen, who is an unofficial midwife in the area, is witness to one baby being born with the top half of it's head and brain missing. When three other couples have babies born with only partial brains, she can no longer stand as one with the logging community and deny that the spraying isn't poisoning them all. Anyone who opposes the spraying in the slightest is mercilessly turned on by the rest of the community, i.e., houses burned, children shunned at school, pets killed, etc. As it finally dawns on Rich that maybe Colleen is right and the spraying that goes directly into their water source may have been responsible for all her miscarriages, not to mention Chub's frequent nosebleeds, he sides with his wife and must face the wrath and revenge of the other loggers and the company. There is so much detail I'm leaving out, like what wonderful moments we see every day between Rich, Colleen and Chub as they traverse to the creek in the woods behind their house each morning to make sure they've got a clear pipe up to the house...Rich showing Chub all the while how to navigate the forest by using the palm of his hand as a map for all the creeks and boundaries. Or, like the sweet moments between Colleen and Chub when she asks him "where did you get those beautiful eyebrows?" and his answer is always "at the eyebrow store." Or, even the heart wrenching moments for Colleen of Chub's first day of kindergarten, which leave her truly alone for the first time in a long time. Or, the battle that Rich has with himself over his commitment to providing for his family the only way he knows how versus the risky step he takes financially to ensure their welfare in the future. Word by word, page by page, it's just a lovely book, but it doesn't sugarcoat the horrific moments. It makes them part of the lives of all these people as horrific moments are. As the person who recommended it to me said, the last fifty pages are a roller coaster of emotion, heartbreak and a bit of joy. It's definitely a book that will stay with me for awhile and one that I'd love to see a follow up to.