Woodsburner

by John Pipkin

Woodsburner springs from a little-known event in the life of one of America’s most iconic figures, Henry David Thoreau. On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods—an event that altered the landscape of American thought in a single day.

Against the background of Thoreau’s fire, Pipkin’s ambitious debut penetrates the mind of the young philosopher while also painting a panorama of the young nation at a formative moment. Pipkin’s Thoreau is a lost soul, plagued by indecision, resigned to a career designing pencils for his father’s factory while dreaming of better things. On the day of the fire, his path will intersect with three very different local citizens, each of whom also harbors a secret dream. Oddmund Hus, a lovable Norwegian farmhand, pines for the wife of his brutal employer. Elliott Calvert, a prosperous bookseller, is also a hilariously inept aspiring playwright. And Caleb Dowdy preaches fire and brimstone to his congregation through an opium haze. Each of their lives, like Thoreau’s, is changed forever by the fire.

Like Geraldine Brooks’s March and Colm Tóibín’s The Master , Woodsburner illuminates America’s literary and cultural past with insight, wit, and deep affection for its unforgettable characters, as it brings to vivid life the complex man whose writings have inspired generations

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels, Historical, Literature, Nature, Books About Books

384 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 2009

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Novel Of Henry David Thoreau And His America

John Pipkin's first novel "Woodsburner" (2009) is set in Concord, Massachusetts in 1844 and describes an incident in the life of Thoreau (1817 -- 1862). On April 30, 1844, Thoreau and a companion spent a day fishing. When they returned to land to cook their catch, Thoreau lit a fire which, as a result of heavy winds and a long dry spell, got away. The fire threatened the adjacent woods as well as the town of Concord. Prompt action by the town residents put out the fire after a loss of about 300 forested acres. Obviously embarrassed by the incident, Thoreau did not write about it until 1850, and then only in the privacy of his Journal.

Pipkin tells convincingly and well the story of the fire,its escape, the destruction it caused, and the heroic efforts of the local citizens to put it out. The difficulties of fighting wildfires, of course, survives into the 21st Century Pipkin also offers a well-drawn portrait of the young Thoreau, with details about his relationship with his brother John who had died tragically in 1842. Pipkin describes the pencil factory Thoreau operated together with his family. Thoreau made several notable improvements to the process of manufacturing pencils. Most importantly, Pipkin describes a young man still seeking his path in life. With some plausibility, Pipkin suggests that the experience with the wildfire may have been formative for Thoreau. In 1845, Thoreau moved to Walden Pond, where he wrote a book about an earlier river trip with John, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and began working on the book that became "Walden".

All of this makes an excellent basis for a historical novel. The trouble is, I thought, that Pipkin tries too much for a first novel and, as a result, the book loses its focus and in places comes close to collapse. Fighting a forest fire is a serious, emergency endeavor that requires the full, immediate, attention of the participants. So too should be a book about the exigencies of fighting a forest fire.

Pipkin recounts the story in the voices of several characters who in one way or the other are impacted by the fire but who also have their own stories to tell. The characters include a solitary farmhand and immigrant, Oddmund, who is in love with Emma, the wife of the farmer for whom he works. Elliott Calvert, who manages a bookstore and is writing a play about --- a burning house -- is also a key character in the story. Then, there are two elderly women, one of them blind, also immigrants who were imprisoned in Europe for many years for being lovers before coming to America to begin a new life.

Finally, the book tells to story of the Reverend Caleb Ephraim Dowdy, who followed the footsteps of his father in Boston and became a minister. Caleb is a tormented soul, filled with doubts about the existence of God and influenced in spite of himself by the pantheism and transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Obsessed both with his own misdeeds and with what he sees as the possibility that there is nothing beyond death, Caleb seeks to find evidences of eternity in the lives of sinners. His story is troubling and may be the most interesting part of the book.

Pipkin recounts the stories of each character and their early lives in a series of separated flashbacks. Each story is well done and interesting in itself. But together they become distracting from Thoreau and his fire, making the book disjointed. It is only with difficulty that Pipkin connects the separate threads of each story to the main event of the fire, and the book seems forced as a result. The fire symbolism throughout the book, and the role fire plays in the separate stories also seems too obvious and overused.

There is material in this novel for several books with the result that the book is not fully successful as one. Pipkin offers a good portrayal of a growing young United States with characters having diverse dreams for themselves and their lives and, on the whole, realizing them. The American experience receives a largely positive portrayal. The townspeople of Concord unite quickly and effectively to extinguish the fire. The sections about Caleb are interesting in their character and in their philosophical speculations even though his story and the stories of the other characters do not integrate well with the story of Henry Thoreau and the fire.

The merits of the book outweigh the deficiencies. Pipkin may well be able to offer an approach which is both more focused and digs deeper in subsequent novels.

Robin Friedman

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories of four main characters, three fictional, one real, intertwine on one fateful day near 1844 era Concord, MA, the birthplace of transcendentalism. Henry David Thoreau and his friend John Hoar have been fishing in Walden Pond on a hot, dry, windy day in May. John insists they light a fire in the woods so they can make fish stew from the day's catch. Henry (who's recently `rearranged' his name from David Henry) has misgivings but lights the fire anyway. The famous Walden Pond woods fire ensues. The fictional characters' stories intertwine with Thoreau's. Eliot Calvert, a Boston and hoping to be soon be, Concord book dealer, Odmund Hus, a Norweigian immigrant who's working as a hired hand for a local couple (he's in love with the wife), and Caleb, a troubled fundamentalist minister. It's fire that unites all four of these men. Henry lights the fire, Eliot is writing a play that ends with a conflagration, Odmund's family was killed in a shipboard fire upon landing in Concord, and Caleb is obsessed with the fires of Hell. All four men unite with other townsfolk to fight the fire.

This is a fateful day in the men's lives. It's events change all of them. They gain new perspectives and even new lives. The book is well written and entertaining. The period details help it come alive. Pipkin does a great job of illustrating Thoreau's innate differentness and some events that had a huge impact in forming who he became. It helps put Thoreau in perspective of his time, place and events.

[Eileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel just won the 2009 Mercantile Library/Center for Fiction's Best First Novel Prize!

Move Pipkin's Woodsburner to the top of your reading pile! While Woodsburner is a novel about Henry David Thoreau, it manages to exceed or escape all of the ponderous transcendental baggage that could sink a good story. The Thoreau of the novel is a young pencilmaker who has not yet retreated to Walden; the fire he sets in the Concord woods is the result of a fish chowder gone wrong. Woodsburner is beautifully written, meticulously researched, thoughtful, sexy and funny all at the same time.

[Geoff Wyss · Rating 3 out of 5]

An . . . interesting book, but I can't really recommend it. On a sentence-by-sentence (and sometimes paragraph-by-paragraph) level, it's often excellent. Pipkin is good at describing things (fire, the woods, sometimes people) and actions (a ship exploding, men fighting a forest fire). The writing is good enough often enough to hold you.

But in larger ways--plot, characterization, theme, in other words all the most important stuff--the book is frequently maddening. The plot (which switches between a handful of characters in Concord on the day Thoreau started a fire in the woods) is full of cute contrivances, gimmicky connections between characters that, while not impossible, aren't believable--it's "fiction" through and through. And the book hits you over the head, at length and repeatedly, with its themes; there's barely any space for the reader to think. And the themes are obvious (though they might not seem so if they weren't stated so early and worked over so tiresomely). And about half of the main characters are nothing more than ideas worked out in human form. If Thoreau is not, it's only because Pipkin has so many (and such various) ideas to draw from in 'Walden.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

On an April day in 1844 Henry David Thoreau and a friend accidentally caused a fire that consumed about 300 acres of timber and threatened the town of Concord. Woodsburner is about that fire and about how it affects the lives of the novel's wonderful ensemble of characters. Because each of those characters is identified with a fire other than the Concord fire, one could almost say it's a novel about fire. Each character has a fire in their life and it means different things to each of them. Because I thought the novel trolled deeper waters than fire being several ideas of hell, I tried to look beyond that. Still, I think it's part of Pipkin's scheme. Toward the end of the novel is a description of the men as shadows desperately fighting the leading edge of the fire with hoe and shovel amid the terrible smoke and heat. That seemed pointed to me. But fire here is many things. To one it may signify guilt while to another it may be as simple as the taste of fire on his tongue when he takes a sip of whiskey. Thoreau, who startd the fire and soon became amazed at the size and uncontainable nature of it, thought of it as existence itself, before which he was helpless. What I believe is one of Pipkin's conclusions is that fire is redemptive. Concord was, as we know, one of the centers of transcendentalist thought in the 19th century, thought which is in some ways similar to Buddhism. So I wonder if we're not supposed to think of fire in the purifying terms of Buddhism. Thinking in that way, fire redeems. Each fire becomes a way these characters cleanse themselves. The novel's final section is set in time after the Concord fire. The characters have progressed in their personal narratives yet fire is still a part of each life. Those who have reached a state of grace are those who learn to control the fire in their life, whether building a roaring campfire or roasting coffee beans over an open flame. For a reader like me, fascinated with Alcott and Thoreau and Emerson and the little Concord world they inhabited, it's all wonderfully imagined and reconstructed in Woodsburner, right down to the language of the period. Surprisingly, I thought Thoreau the least interesting of the characters. Perhaps we know so much about him that Pipkin's imagination in making a young Thoreau was smothered before it could ignite him into energetic flame. Beginning the novel I'd thought Thoreau was to be the main character. Instead, I now believe it to be a man named Oddmund Hus, himself the most natural character in the novel and able to teach Thoreau a thing or two. It's just one of the interesting twists making this a wonderful novel, fully realized and hard to put down.

[Jim Neeley · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappoinment, but an interesting read.

I would compare it, in a sense, to an overly produced album, next to a roughly produced low -fi album. One may be technically accomplished but the later has more heart. Woodsburner was an overly produced album, created in a state of the art studio by a good technician. This book, in its description, purported to be about Henry David Thoreau starting a forest fire in Concord just before he moved to Walden Woods, a topic which interested me immensely. Partially it was. It is a fiction, so I did not expect a historical narrative.

I did though expect more Thoreau in it, of the 37 chapters; he was the main character focus of only 8, and mentioned only in passing in others. The other chapters concern other residents of Concord and Boston, on that particular day, which are effected by the fire. Some of their stories interested me greatly, especially Reverend Caleb , although I did not like at all the surprise ending of his story, 1t should have been left with him walking into the forest fire. I did like the forays into old Boston, having spent some time living there, I could picture the area. Not the wealthy Louisburg Square, but a crowded and noisy, with manure strewn streets leading to opium dens. The character stories all intersect together by the end, but I had long since stopped caring about most of them. There were also sexual scenes and story lines, which seemed to me, included solely for the sake of shock value (shocking at an academic dinner party). Not to give anything away, but Oddmund’s relation to the pumpkins, was completely unbelievable. The colonial pornography story line, at first seemed realistic, but soon took on a modern slant that didn't fit the pre-civil war times. I do not deny pornography existed then, it did in Pompeii, but I do not think this was a truthful or historic portrayal.

I do think Pipkin got Thoreau's reaction to the fire correct. I'm also reading Walden and can see Thoreau trying to justify the fire being something more than his own stupid mistake, of trying to light a fire on a windy dry day.

[Alice Meloy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The premise of the book is a true story: Henry David Thoreau one day accidentally set a fire that spread and burned down 300 acres of the woods near Concord, Massachusetts. This was BEFORE he moved to a cabin on Walden Pond and wrote his famous book, and could have been the impetus for his decision to stop making pencils for his father and start contemplating philosophy and nature. At least that's what Pipkin would have us think happened in this beautifully written debut novel that explores the events of the day of the fire in the lives of Thoreau and several other individuals who were in or near Concord that day. As he fleshes out the characters in his story, Pipkin does a masterful job of creating the zeitgeist of early 19th century America. I was so wrapped up in the individual stories that I really hated to see the novel come to an end. Highly recommended.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tthe beginning, I thought this would be a 3-star book. I was almost sorry that I had committed to it. I was in a really busy time at work and only reading before bed and kept falling asleep. But once I had bigger chunks of time to devote to these characters, I really enjoyed their stories. To me, the story is less about Henry David Thoreau and more about the ficitonal characters who are impacted by his setting fire to the woods. Once the complexities of each characgter were revealed to me, I had to keep reading to see where they would end up. I"m glad I persevered and had some high-quality reading time available.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late in April 1844, a pair of misfits went camping on the Concord River in Massachusetts, with plans to survive "Indian-style" on the fish they caught. The forest along the banks was dangerously dry, but one of the young men started a campfire anyway. Encouraged by a brisk wind, the flames quickly spread to the grass and then to the pines and birch trees. Before the end of that awful day, 300 acres had been reduced to ash.

You know this accidental arsonist as the world's most famous naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. But to the aggrieved men of Concord, he was known for many years as that "damned rascal," the "Woodsburner." Not surprisingly, Thoreau didn't refer to this incident in his classic meditation on nature, "Walden; or, Life in the Woods." He couldn't even bring himself to mention it in his own journal until six years after the fact, when he finally described the fire with such shameless pride and self-justification that you want to slap him upside his Transcendental head.

But now, 165 years later, that awful day finally bursts back into flame. John Pipkin's brooding first novel, "Woodsburner," starts on the morning of April 30, as Henry David squats on the bank of Fair Haven Bay and strikes a match he bummed from a shoemaker. The novel ends that evening, as the blackened forest glows in the darkness and soot snows down on the town of Concord. Over the course of this momentous day, Pipkin moves back in time and across the Atlantic, describing several other characters whose lives are lit by their own fires and altered by Thoreau's conflagration.

The ingenious nature of this structure grows clearer with each haunting chapter. The fire that "flows like brilliant liquid" through Concord Woods is a natural engine for a terrifically exciting story, and Pipkin conveys such a visceral impression of the "clever flames crouching in the branches" that you can feel the heat radiating off these pages.

You would expect Thoreau to dominate this story, but he falls away for long sections. When he does appear, though, he speaks and thinks in a mixture of innocence, self-righteousness, apprehension and nobility. Pipkin, who was born and raised in Baltimore, attends precisely to the details of Thoreau's life, his descriptions in "The Journal" and even the epigraphic phrases of "Walden." The character who emerges is a rough-hewn preview of the polished icon that Thoreau has become. In the best sections, this lonely 26-year-old man is torn with grief over the recent death of his brother and anxiety about his future. (How long can he make pencils in his father's factory?) It's a portrait far more attentive to the complexity and turmoil of the man than we get in, say, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's popular sanctification of him in their play "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail."

But just as captivating are those characters Pipkin has invented, men and women consumed by their own passions. They provide a fascinating impression of the nation when it was still young and swelling and struggling to define itself. They see the Concord fire through their own private flames -- fire is everywhere in this novel -- and Pipkin allows them to brush up against each other in the most subtle and ingenious ways.

New England religious fever is represented by an itinerant preacher, a Gothic figure smelling of brimstone and appalled by Ralph Waldo Emerson's misty brand of Unitarianism. He's chosen this fiery April day to announce the construction of a church in the Concord woods. Haunted by the possibility that nothing lies beyond but "a blank, empty, measureless abyss," the Rev. Caleb Dowdy has devised an infernal scheme to offend God so deeply that He will make His displeasure manifest in the physical world. Seeing the forest burst into flames is the proof he craves that "the palsied hand of Providence" is finally moving.

Meanwhile, a snobbish bookstore owner has just arrived from Boston to survey his new store in Concord when the call goes up for firefighters. Eliot Calvert is a merchant worn down by the forces of commerce, the sort of figure suggested by Thoreau's stinging critique of the businessman in "Walden." Once an aspiring (and hilariously awful) playwright, he sacrificed his artistic ambitions to satisfy the demands of his purse, imagining that each new concession to commercial success would give him the freedom he desires. (How depressing to read that even pre-Civil War bookstore owners felt they needed to clutter their shops with everything but books to make a profit. And of course, then as now, when nothing else will sell, there's always porn.) The Concord fire might afford him the chance for real heroism or artistic insight -- or deadly blunder. He's a brilliantly drawn character, ridiculous and pompous, but finally deeply sympathetic.

But from start to finish "Woodsburner" belongs to a strange farmhand named Oddmund Hus (Odd for short, and for real). This painfully shy young man comes to the New World in the novel's most spectacular conflagration, an explosion in Boston Harbor that propels him to shore even as it kills the rest of his Norwegian family. His tumultuous upbringing in America and his efforts to tame his sexual urges display the remarkable texture of Pipkin's storytelling. A kind of precursor of the hermit Thoreau will eventually pretend to be in "Walden," Odd lives alone in the woods, but unlike Thoreau, he burns with desire for a woman, the plump wife of his master. It's an irresistibly tender story, grounded in tragedy but flecked with some outrageously bawdy moments. When the alarm goes up in Concord, we can't tell whether this emergency will finally ignite his smoldering affections or send him fleeing deeper into the woods.

At the end of the day, when the embers begin to cool and the various story lines in "Woodsburner" draw to a close, Odd is the character who burns brightest in this profound and thoughtful novel, but all of them will linger in your mind.

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[Beth Farley · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the things I love . . . .historical, beautiful writing with some subtle humor, and interesting characters.

[Tom Dillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before writing his masterpiece, Walden Pond, Thoreau burned down 300 acres of Concord forest in 1844, a real historical event used as the backdrop for this novel. Woods Burner was the author’s first book and my expectations were low. I was not expecting such interesting and deep characters. The book’s structure involves each chapter focusing on one of the main of the characters. We learn about the eccentricities of each - a fanatical pastor associated to opium, a farmer with a harrowing past, an Irish immigrant woman obsessed with books (though nearly illiterate) and married to a lout, a would-be playwright disappointed by life, and Thoreau himself. I loved their unusual life stories and how they brought to life the 1840s. For most of the book, we get to know them separately, until the grand finale which returns to the fire and the existential challenge of fighting it. The whole book builds toward this ending, and each character reaches an appropriate denouement as the raging fire transforms them. 4.5 stars

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

A friend gave me this book to read. He told me he loved it so much that he wanted to share it with someone else whom he knew would also love it and I was to pass it on to someone else. Unfortunately I didn't love it as much as he did. The set-up of "Woodsburner" is usually my favorite. An actual historical event happens, in this case the accidental fire in the woods near Concord MA in the mid-1800s, and the author tells us the stories of several individuals affected by the fire, switches back and forth between the individuals telling us their pasts as well as what their lives are now. Two of the stories, well, actually three, just weren't interesting to me. I couldn't relate to Eliot or Caleb at all, Thoreau wasn't that interesting either but since he was the one who set the fire I guess we're stuck with him. I did like Oddmund's story very much and wish there had been more on him and on Emma, the woman he loved. Anezka and Zalenka were also interesting and I would have liked to have read more about them.

Overall I would recommend the book since the writing is well done and the story of Oddmund is worth reading, perhaps others will find the stories of Eliot and Caleb to be more interesting than I did.

[AJ Conroy]

From NPR:

Woodsburner, by John Pipkin, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, Hardcover, 370 pages, List Price: $24.95

True fact: One year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau accidentally scorched 300 acres of the Concord woods. In Woodsburner, John Pipkin's lyrical debut novel, Pipkin re-creates the events of that day from the perspective of Thoreau and several other Concord residents — an opium-addicted preacher, a pompous bookseller and, in some of the novel's most flat-out beautiful passages, a love-starved Norwegian farmhand — who will see their lives irrevocably changed by the fire.

Pipkin's characters are full of convincing contradictions: His Thoreau, for example, spends the day vacillating between guilt over the accident and defiantly rationalizing his incautious actions. The author has some thoughtful things to say about the notion of American freedom, and the conflagration that serves as Woodsburner's central metaphor allows him to say them in language that is at once vividly precise and richly allusive.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great novelization of one afternoon in Concord, Mass, in 1844, when America's first great environmentalist, Henry David Thoreau, set a fire that burned 300 acres of woods to the ground, indeed threatening Concord itself. My friend Andrew Lenaghan handed my a galley copy of this first novel by John Pipkin, and I swear you can smell the pine pitch combusting. Pipkin seems to develop a set of theories about Thoreau here, one of which I think is that had he not suffered the shame of having torched the woods, Thoreau wouldn't have made the decisions that produced of him one of our most important writers and thinkers. But more than anything, it's a helluva story.

[Richard Gilbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This beautifully written literary novel depicts the incident in which Thoreau of pre-fame and pre-Walden days accidentally started a forest fire that burned 300 acres. I love Thoreau so found the chapters on him compelling. The author did a lot of research and has a nice light touch with it. The book alternates POV characters on the day of the fire, and some of them I found fascinating and some boring and began to skim them. This is a celebrated novel but is nonetheless very slow moving and only for true Thoreau fans.

[Ann Woodlief · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1844 Thoreau accidentally set the woods near Concord on fire. This is a book about that fateful day, and how it marks a major turning point for him and 3 other characters caught up in fighting the fire. I know the time, place, and person pretty well, and I think that Pipkin "gets it." He builds on what facts are known, and finds the drama in complex motivations. This Thoreau is no hero, but he's on his way (at age 26, finally).

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good-paced, interesting historical fiction read. It is based on the true event of Henry David Thoreau setting fire to the woods near Concord, Massachusetts in the early 1840s. The other characters in the book are fictional as are their story lines, with the exception of Henry David's friend, Edward. I enjoyed this book.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knew Thoreau was responsible for burning down 300 acres of woods outside of Concord? As the fire spreads, the story reveals it effect on several characters appropriate to the time. The writing is beautiful.

[Edan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful and wise book that hasn't gotten much attention. It was a slow beginning for me, but an early description of a man fucking a pumpkin (my words) won me over. I loved these characters, especially poor Oddsmund, with his dead family and his love for fat Emma. Oh!

[Anna Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful prose. Flawed characters that evoke sympathy. Hopeful, wistful, and horrible moments are all captured honestly and precisely. And an ending that left me delightfully satisfied. If you are interested in historical or literary fiction, this needs to be on your list.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dallas Morning News review. . .

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Thoroughly entertaining and loads of little gems throughout. Highly recommended!

[Hobey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Henry David Thoreau, author of the classic, Walden, is one of the main characters in this story. The book is structured around a forest fire that actually occurred on April 30, 1844 in Concord, Massachusetts. Young Thoreau, out in the woods with a friend Edward Sherman Hoar, was preparing a fire in a stump in order to make chowder, when the campfire got out of control, and led to 300 acres being burnt. Aside from that, everything in the book is fictional. Pipkin rotates between various characters and jumps around chronologically, taking the reader back in time to formative events in each character’s past. The fire is the culmination of hardships endured, and takes on different meanings for each character. Thoreau is compelled by the event to repent for what he has done to nature, and to retreat to Walden Pond where he plans to live in solitude. Oddmund, an immigrant farmhand in love with his employer's wife, is driven to recklessly run through the flames and doggedly put the fire out, no longer resigning himself to fate. Emma, the wife of a drunkard who secretly reciprocates Oddmund’s feelings for her, flees from her husband after that momentous day, erasing the past and starting afresh like the burnt forest. Eliot, a bookstore owner and self-proclaimed play-write who is visiting Concord that day with the thought of opening a second store in the area, seizes the frightening event as an opportunity to gain first hand experience that will help him unlock the final scene of his play he has been struggling to finish.

Overall, I think Pipkin is quite skilled with words. His sentences are sharp and clear. His ability to describe scenes is better than many writers I have read. I found the plot somewhat lackluster and did not feel particularly invested in the story. Normally I do not mind books where nothing really happens, but unlike this book, what those books lack in plot they make up for in insights and truths.

I related to a few passing remarks in the book, such as Odd’s internal conflict between lust and happiness, or Thoreau’s contentment with solitude, or Eliot’s evaluation of himself as a man of non-worldliness that does not prove true when tested, but these were expounded only at a surface level, so that they consequently were not able to sink down to the innermost part of my being. In order for truths or sparks of inspiration to reach the core of your intellect, soul, being, psyche, etc, they must be brought about in a round about fashion, so that you stumble upon the realizations yourself, causing you feel like you arrived upon it all on your own, when really you were gently nudged in a particular direction the entire time. But when you are told exactly where to go, there is no ah-ha, and therefore, it falls flat. I feel like I read this idea somewhere, but I can’t remember where.

[Mike Shoop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based on a true incident, this piece of historical fiction relates how an accidental fire in the woods near Concord, MA, in April 1844 affected the lives of local citizens, but it especially changed the lives of four men: Henry David Thoreau, who started the fire; Caleb Dowdy, a fallen minister; bookseller and opportunist Eliot Calvert, and immigrant farm laborer Oddmund Hus. Each of these characters relates the events of the fire (which burns 300 acres and threatens Concord itself), and in the process the reader gets their backstories, their relationships with others, hopes, dreams, fears about their futures--in short, where their lives are headed. In the face of terrible devastation, emotions run high, choices are made, futures are settled. Not a fast read, but interesting, well researched and written, with sharply drawn, realistically flawed characters and tense situations and revealing moments, and always the roaring and snarling of the ravenous inferno engulfing everything in its path.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Pipkin's Woodsburner is a fictionalized treatment of a real event.

It concerns Henry David Thoreau, of Walden Pond fame. A year before he went into the woods to commune with the flora and fauna, he set them afire one dry and windy April day. He merely wanted to cook a chowder. But the flames outmaneuvered him in short order, rushing towards the town of Concord, Massachusetts.

Pipkin brings Thoreau and three or four other characters to life. There is a preacher addled by opium (his chapters were slow-going for me), a bookseller who hopes to expand his empire and a Scandinavian farm hand.

Cow patties aplenty.

[Katherine Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

After a steady diet of the literary equivalent of dollar menu burgers, it was so refreshing to bite into this big, juicy piece of steak. Well written, some sentences are so beautiful and deep they require a second chew. This book follows the story lines of several characters and I admit that sometimes I had to ask myself "wait, who is Eliot again?". But that is a small flaw in an otherwise ambitious and delicious work. This book is characterized as historical fiction, but it is more like historical literary fiction, with big themes and deep thoughts to mull over. I was not expecting such a good piece of literature and am looking forward to reading Mr. Pipkin's next book. Well done!

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an odd little book. I didn't know about the true actual event in the life of Thoreau which this novel was based on. But I assumed this would be a bit a Thoreau-centric historical fiction. It was historical fiction and HDT had a role, but this was actual a character tsudy of multriple other people who were involved in/present for the fire. I imagine Pipkin took a lot of artistic license here, which is fine. It's just a strange idea for a novel. That being said, it was pretty well executed and moderately interesting

[Carole Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an entertaining fictional account built around a documented historical event, in which Henry Thoreau and his friend Edward accidentally caused a raging forest fire. The book primarily relates the innermost thoughts of the characters, without much actual dialogue. I found the diversity of the characters, their motivations and behaviors interesting from both a historical perspective and as a current day analogy.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really knew nothing about Thoreau other than he hung out at Walden Pond. I have been to Concord and though it is obviously not the same as it was then, it was nice to relate to the feel of the terrain. I thought this was an ambitious and well done historical novel. I guess I know a little more about Thoreau than when I started.

[Jacqueline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel revolves around a damaging fire Thoreau accidently started before his famous sojourn at Walden Pond. Intertwining the lives of other Concord residents, John Pipkin creates a captivating story of how crisis makes individuals re-examine their lives.