Not her best work. Ordinarily I give Dillard rave reviews. This book seemed redundant and lackluster. ( )

I think the biggest reason that I enjoyed this book is that I live in Seattle, so I am familiar with the areas in which it takes place, and can appreciate how much this area has changed in the past 150 years. The book really made me think about the first white settlers who came out here, and how hard their lives were, yet how rewarding the landscape could be for them, as it is for me.

On the downside, the book is at time gruesome and depressing - life was hard for these people, and Dillard doesn't spare us any of the grief or gore. Sometimes I didn't really understand the characters and their feelings. The plot line doesn't really follow a conflict-resolution trajectory: it is just a continuing saga of a few generations of Puget Sound's first settlers, and as such the plot wasn't very satisfying. Closer to real life, perhaps, but there was never a sense of resolution. Dillard's writing is very rewarding. ( )

Slow, like a Pacific Northwest winter, but I found myself caught up in the story of these pioneers and their families who faced hardship and death. The prose was amazing, full of literary devices that often caused me to stop for a moment and generally made me read slower than I usually do.

I purchased this book shortly after I moved to Bellingham Washington... It was a really great novel that made me really understand how difficult the early settlers had it. I was shocked and dismayed by the huge numbers of people who died horrible deaths in this book. ( )

This novel evoked an amazing sense of place. Set in and around Bellingham Bay in Washington, it follows the lives and deaths of the pioneers that settled there. Following them through boom and bust, it details the painful risk and reward of living life out on the edge of the world. Great characters, great scnenery. Kind of depressing in the way everyone dies and loses everything, but uplifting in that it shows how unconquerable is the human spirit.