North Woods

November 11, 2024 /

North Woods ~ Daniel Mason

A yellow house in the woods of western Massachusetts is the setting for 12 connected stories. Mason tells of the inhabitants of the house, beginning with a couple of Puritan lovers and ending 400 years later. North Woods tells of these lovers, then an apple farmer, twin spinsters, a naturalist painter, a young black woman fleeing slavery and bounty hunters, a schizophrenic, a reporter of true crimes, a history buff, a beetle, and a mountain lion. The writing is so inventive and engrossing.

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.

North Woods is so lyrical, beautiful and horrible at the same time. I will admit that I didn’t always quite understand what was going on in some chapters, and I had to go back and re-listen, but that did not lesson my enjoyment of a story extremely well told. Such beautiful writing. Highly recommended.

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