North Woods

I love the conceit of this novel of interlocking short stories: the book tells of the inhabitants of one specific house in Western Massachusetts, from the Puritan era and then over the course of many centuries. We meet a pair of Puritan lovers, a soldier-turned-farmer determined to grow the best apples of the world, spinster sisters whose ghosts come to haunt the property, a pair of doomed lovers, a participant in a prison pen pal program, a panther. This didn't have the emotional resonance I find in my favorite novels, but there is much to admire in what I can only call a very good book: the ingenious looping and overlapping of some of the stories, the strong epistolary components throughout, the emotional pull of some of the threads.