Touch by Alexi Zentner

In less deft hands Zentner's plot is historical romantic fiction, a man sits by the bedside of his dying mother recalling his memories of the small northern logging town founded by his grandfather.  There is drama and pathos, hard winters, terrible choices and losses set against the backdrop of goldrushes and lost dreams.  But this book is far more than that, invoking the spirits of the forests and the mythology of a family where the fantastical and the everyday live side by side.  Zentner speaks  the snow and ice of the frozen winters and the terrible dangers of logging and living on the edge of human existence into being in a book I didn't want to end.