Deep River (Marlantes) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Marlantes conveys the… dangerous romance of logging superbly. His descriptions of logging itself—the ingenious mechanics of taking down trees and the skill of experienced loggers—are wonderfully detailed, dramatic and exhilarating…. Mighty physical, social and economic forces operate the plot of this novel, buffeting its characters, raising them up, flinging them down, twisting their fates together. Deep River is a big American novel.
Wall Street Journal


Deep River is an engrossing and commanding historical epic about one immigrant family’s shifting fortunes…a feat of lavish storytelling.
Washington Post


As a portrait of a complicated American era, and one family’s mighty struggle against it, the novel is both fascinating and fierce. And well worth the hours it asks of its reader.
San Francisco Chronicle


Deep River is an engrossing and commanding historical epic about one immigrant family’s shifting fortunes.… [The novel is] alert to the resonances between the past and present… [and] a feat of lavish storytelling…. [But] Marlantes' big-­picture storytelling can come at the expense of its line-by-line prose…. [It] could use some better sentences. But we could also use more spirited novels like Deep River.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune


Inspired by family history, Marlantes offers a sprawling, painstakingly realistic novel about Finnish immigrants in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20th century.… Marlantes’s epic is packed with intriguing detail…, making for a vivid immigrant family chronicle.
Publishers Weekly


Following the eye-catching debut novel Matterhorn…, Marlantes shifts his attention from the Vietnam War to the early 1900s [and an immigrant family of] loggers… along Washington’s grand Columbia River…. A welcome publication, with Matterhorn published nearly a decade ago.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Marlantes poignantly depicts the intimacies of personal dramas that echo the twentieth century’s unprecedented political storms and yet in surprising ways reprise Finland’s oldest mythologies…. An unforgettable novel.
Booklist


Marlantes moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the old-growth forests of Washington in this saga of labor and love.…The story is long and has its longueurs, but Marlantes carefully builds an epic world…. A novel that sometimes struggles under its own weight but that's well worth reading.
Kirkus Reviews