🍎 "North Woods": A Timeless Tale of Forbidden Fruit and Family
Book Review: 🌿 From Poisoned Apples to Gourmet Orchards: The Origins of Osgood's Wonder
😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
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🍎📖 In "North Woods," a magical apple tree connects many stories over hundreds of years. It all starts when a man eats a poisoned apple 🍎☠️ and the core grows into a tree with the yummiest apples ever! 🌳😋 Two sisters take care of the tree and the house nearby, where lots of people live and love and leave behind ghosts. 👭👻 The book takes you on a wild ride through time, from the days of Pilgrims to today's true crime podcasts, all because of one special apple tree! 🌿🎧
¡Saludos, amigos! Today, I want to talk about a book that has captured my heart and imagination - "North Woods" by Daniel Mason.
Now, I'll be honest: I was a bit skeptical when I first saw this book on The New York Times' Top 10 list for 2023. The cover with the cougar and the Puritan setting didn't immediately grab me. But hey, the NYT has a pretty good track record when it comes to predicting Pulitzer winners (just look at "Demon Copperhead" and "Trust" from 2022!), so I decided to give it a shot.
And boy, am I glad I did! "North Woods" took me on a marvelous, meandering journey through time, weaving together seemingly disparate stories that are all connected by one thing - an apple tree. But this is no ordinary apple tree, amigos. It's an arboreal anchor that ties together centuries of tales.
The story starts with a scene straight out of Nathaniel Hawthorne - a man offers an apple to a woman in old Massachusetts, and she responds, "Who am I, Eve?" Little does she know that this apple will set off a chain of events that will echo through the ages.
I don't want to spoil the entire story, but let me give you a quick taste of what happens next. The man eats the apple, and it turns out that these visitors to the women's cabin in the days of Pilgrims and witches had sinister intentions. The men are poisoned, and after they try to kill the women, they are killed with an axe. After a long time, with rain, exposure, and nature taking its course, the bodies decompose, and wolves and birds have their fill. But something remarkable happens - a seed from the apple core eaten by the man takes root in the now-fertile soil and grows into a tree that bears the best-tasting apples the world has ever known!
This plot point reminded me of my recent research and a podcast I listened to about the growing gourmet apple industry. My first encounter with this was when I first tried a Honeycrisp apple - it was a whole new realm of taste, even at $3 a pound! Since then, new breeds of gourmet apples have emerged, bringing down prices. The podcast discussed how these apples must be grafted from the chosen tree, and simply spreading seeds won't work, rendering the Johnny Appleseed myth moot.
Fast-forwarding to the past and the book, the orchard of Osgood Apples came from this tree born from a man's stomach. As the author writes:
"A single tree does not an orchard make, their father warned them, and when their first February came, they watched him gently cut a hundred scions from the bare tips of the apple's branches, and helped him carry them inside the house. There, in the dining room and parlor, they'd set out a hundred little burlap sacks of earth, each bearing a rootstock purchased from a nursery in Oakfield. And their father showed them how he cut each stock so that it fitted neatly against each cutting, and they helped him bind the pair with bandages (their little field hospital!) and slathered them with a grafting wax from tallow, beeswax, and rosin that hardened in the winter air."
Two sisters, young girls at the time, tend to this orchard of the best apples ever known to man and the house that various characters will live in until the present day, centuries later, with a diverse cast of characters. Spirits linger among those who have lived there, love, and lost lives, all centered around this little garden of Eden with an apple tree: The Apple Tree.
"North Woods" takes us on an extraordinary journey through time, language, and history, from Puritanism to crime podcasts exploring historical stories about previous people who have lived and may have died in that American Garden of Eden, all contained within its pages.
So, if you're looking for a book that will transport you through time, tantalize your taste buds, and tug at your heartstrings, give "North Woods" a try. It's a delicious, daring, and deeply satisfying read. I can't recommend it enough.
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