Barkskins (Proulx) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Annie Proulx is on the side of the angels. We need more writers like her to hammer home the message that we had better stop mistreating one another and our planet. Unfortunately, hammering is just what she does, as when she annotates a senator's remark that "the Constitution was made by whites for whites." ("After all," she inserts, "who else was there?" Ha, ha.) The whole novel suffers such two-dimensionality.... [Still,] Proulx is particularly effective in conveying the effect of one generation on the next.... The root cause of our self-impoverishment is thoughtfully teased out in Barkskins.
William T. Vollman - New York Times Book Review


Magnificent... Barkskins flies... One of the chief pleasures of Proulx’s prose is that it conveys you to so many vanished wildwoods, where you get to stand ‘tiny and amazed in the kingdom of pines.’ This is also the great sadness of Barkskins. The propulsive tension here is generated not by wondering what will happen to each character, but by knowing that the forests will be leveled one after another... If Barkskins doesn’t bear exquisite witness to our species’s insatiable appetite for consumption, nothing can.
Anthony Doerr - Outside Magazine


(Starred review.) Barkskins is remarkable...for its scope and ambition—it spans more than 300 years and includes a cast of dozens. It’s a monumental achievement, one that will perhaps be remembered as her finest work.... [T]he kind of immersive reading experience that only comes along every few years. —Gabe Habash
Publishers Weekly


Rene Sel and Charles Duquet arrive in New France in the 1600s, penniless woodcutters bound to a seigneur (feudal lord), longing for freedom.... Proulx's intricate, powerful meditation on colonialism is both enthralling and edifying, each chapter building to the moving finale. —Stephanie Sendaula
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [A] rigorously researched, intrepidly imagined, complexly plotted, and vigorously written multigenerational epic. [With an] extensive and compelling cast, Proulx’s commanding epic about the annihilation of our forests is nothing less than a sylvan Moby-Dick replete..
Booklist


(Starred review.) Proulx moves into Michener territory with a vast multigenerational story of the North Woods.... Proulx's story builds in depth and complication without becoming unduly tangled and is always told with the most beautiful language. Another tremendous book from Proulx.
Kirkus Reviews