Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

The compelling personification of the labor activism once perceived as an alien Bolshevik threat by many Americans, Aino Koski stands out as a courageous female labor organizer in Marlantes' compelling new family saga. An immigrant who has fled a czarist-oppressed Finland with two brothers, Aino struggles to unionize the lumberjacks of the Pacific Northwest to protect them against the exploitation of ruthless lumber companies backed by callous courts and brutal police. Readers will feel both Aino's political passion and her emotional heartbreak as her activism strains her ties to her ethnic community, husband, and daughter. And they will recognize how Aino's travails fit within a larger social tapestry, as Marlantes weaves those travails into the turbulent lives of Ilmari and Matti, Aino's brothers, who likewise endure physical and emotional trauma in their new home, finding lethal peril behind the beauty of its towering trees and swift rivers, encountering tawdry betrayals behind its lofty constitutional ideals. 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. Finally, it is Aino tested in the novel's climax by the exposure of long-hidden and horrifying secrets who carries the reader to a profoundly humanizing conclusion. An unforgettable novel.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2019 Booklist

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Marlantes's debut, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, a story heavily influenced by the author's experience as a marine, received critical praise for its unblinking portrayal of innocence, patriotism, and violence. Here, Marlantes pushes deep into his family's past to create a generational tale about Finnish immigrants, American capitalism, and forgotten heroes. Inspired by the 19th-century epic poem The Kalevala and Marlantes's own family history, the narrative is set in 1900s America. Fleeing from Finland to Washington State, the Koski siblings find work in the nascent logging industry of the Pacific Northwest. Youngest daughter Aino watches her brothers and colleagues lose their limbs, health, and wages as the need for timber outpaces a concern for human capital. Swept up in the energy of the emerging labor union movement, Aino matures into a fiery advocate for organized labor and the dignity of the human spirit. However, an egalitarian ideology pits her against America's cresting wave of industrialization and its consolidation of power and wealth. Though the characters feel real, this angle can make them seem like mouthpieces for political movements at times. VERDICT An admirable work, this monomyth is dense (maybe sometimes too dense) with Marlantes's gift for lyricism and evocative language. [See Prepub Alert, 1/14/19.]-Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.