The characters in Deep River are grounded in work, and Mr. Marlantes conveys the elements, arcana and dangerous romance of logging superbly. His descriptions of logging itself—the ingenious mechanics of taking down trees and the skill of experienced loggers—are wonderfully detailed, dramatic and exhilarating ... Mr. Marlantes’s graphic portrayals of the devastation that indiscriminate logging brought to old-growth forests, the pitiless exploitation of loggers who labored from dawn to dusk, and the ghastly injuries they suffered are vivid and sickening. On the other hand, an overall sense of the country’s vigorous, can-do attitude in the first decades of the 20th century is palpable ... Mighty physical, social and economic forces operate the plot of this novel, buffeting its characters, raising them up, flinging them down, twisting their fates together. Deep River is a big American novel, akin to Annie Proulx’s Barkskins and, to an extent, Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.

...in 2010 he delivered Matterhorn a heaving 600-page epic about the Vietnam War that was largely about the plodding, crushing effort of a company of Marines to reclaim control of a mountaintop base ... There’s something similarly, stubbornly offbeat about Marlantes’ second novel, Deep River ... Sweeping assimilation novels, especially about white ethnic groups, have been out of fashion for years ... Still, Marlantes’s idiosyncratic approach is to his credit: Deep River is an engrossing and commanding historical epic about one immigrant family’s shifting fortunes. And though its story is a century old, this time it speaks more directly to America’s current predicament ... Deep River earns its scope in part because it reveals the frustratingly incremental effort to improve conditions — every demand, from straw for bedding to eight-hour workdays, becomes a pitched battle ... Deep River is a feat of lavish storytelling; Marlantes ably balances details about the logging industry and the black markets its cheapskate owners help foster, from brothels to bootlegging. But, as in Matterhorn, Marlantes’s big-picture storytelling can come at the expense of its line-by-line prose ... Deep River could use some better sentences. But we could also use more spirited novels like Deep River.

Whether describing the logging or commercial fishing industries, Marlantes shows an extraordinary knowledge of his subjects, and in the scenes dedicated to these hardscrabble endeavors, the story hums with energy ... The implicit tensions feel timeless and still relevant ... the urgency of his voice lifts off the page. The question for this reader is not whether the experience of the Koski family transcends time — certainly it does—but whether the novel needs all its bulk to do so. At times the story feels redundant ... If Deep River is meant to serve as a new American epic, it overreaches. But as a portrait of a complicated American era, and one family’s mighty struggle against it, the novel is both fascinating and fierce. And well worth the hours it asks of its reader.

There’s something...stubbornly offbeat about Marlantes’ second novel, Deep River ... Still, Marlantes’ idiosyncratic approach is to his credit: Deep River is an engrossing and commanding historical epic about one immigrant family’s shifting fortunes. And although its story is a century old, this time it speaks more directly to America’s current predicament ... Deep River earns its scope ... Marlantes...[is] alert to the resonances between the past and present ... Deep River is a feat of lavish storytelling; Marlantes ably balances details about the logging industry and the black markets its cheapskate owners help foster, from brothels to bootlegging ... But...Marlantes’ big-­picture storytelling can come at the expense of its line-by-line prose ... Lyricism is not his strong suit ... Deep River could use some better sentences. But we could also use more spirited novels like Deep River.

Marlantes writes smoothly readable prose and has a solid skill at developing characters over time ... Marlantes captures the feel of that immigrant enclave with sensitivity, and he’s lavish with technical and period detail: readers will quickly find themselves submerged in the nuances of expat Finnish culture and the dangers of big-timber logging ... The narrative follows Aino with a leaden focus that readers might well come to dread ... the novel’s penchant for exposition is unchecked ... Deep River is impressively ambitious, but...[d]espite its author’s attempts at building a cast and a world, this is very much the novel of a single character. How interesting or sympathetic readers find Aino will in large part determine whether or not they plow on through to the end of the book. Since she’s unchangingly and uncompromisingly herself from the moment we meet her, on Page 6, curling up with the Communist Manifesto, those readers will know soon enough who deep they’re willing to go.

... seems a work born from Willa Cather by way of Upton Sinclair. But this new book is its own animal, and it’s something of a masterpiece ... Marlantes immerses the reader in the life of the Koski siblings, whose worldview is dominated by 'sisu', a Finnish concept of honor, dignity and inner strength ... Page after page is dedicated to the dangerous and grueling job of harvesting gigantic trees from old-growth forests...The reader will be in awe of such hard labor done in the service of exploitive bosses who pay little. At the same time, Deep River bemoans the ruin of virgin forests, the pollution of pristine rivers, the fact that 100-pound wild salmon are now scarce. The book extols the love of family and friends and the beauty of the landscape even as that landscape is ravaged ... Best of all, Marlantes’ new novel has more than a few moments of fun and laughter. Even combative Aino can laugh at herself. In Deep River, she takes her place beside Ántonia Shimerda as one of the great heroines of literature.

...an intergenerational saga that will transform your understanding of hardscrabble societies behind today's Pacific Northwest and the region's history of political radicalism ... It’s also a riveting read in the classic western literature tradition of Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain, delivering the rich pleasures of an epic story well told whether or not you’re drawn to its subject matter ... well-drawn are the 'Bachelor Boys,' Finnish-American World War I veterans who find community, meaning and a salve for wartime trauma as a roving 'band of brothers' ... The realism of Deep River comes with a magical tinge.

The novel is a stalwart refresher on how tough life must have been when to post two letters on union business cost more than a week’s wages ... The book’s flaw is not the earnestness of its political story, but its narration. From Robert Graves to Ernst Jünger, James Salter to Michael Herr to Marlantes himself, the horror and fear of combat electrifies the simplest prose with huge tension and brutal significance. In Deep River, little of that gripping intensity is present; extensive sections of a long book feel perfunctory. Marlantes writes almost wholly in accessible, unchallenging prose, pretty much stripped of description ... Without the energy and anticipation of a combat scenario behind it, it only has the exhaustive agenda of spelling out every significant event that happens to the Koski siblings. Chapters lack dramatic tension ... There is an accumulating sense of documentary-like facts being adumbrated and ticked off, qualified by the helpful dates on which they occurred. Readers are told lots of dry information, rather than being permitted to experience these facts through the story, so we get plain, clunky exposition ... The logging sequences contain fascinating detail and a lovely set piece...Marlantes is quite capable of wonderful stuff like this. However, logging is already a rich fictional mini-genre ... We learn and grow from the novel, and many will embrace its long-term company and businesslike storytelling. Through girth and plenitude, hefty books often attempt to grab status. Marlantes is far too sincere a writer to be accused of that; yet I believe a shorter book might have given this story so much more power.

Though the characters feel real, this angle can make them seem like mouthpieces for political movements at times ... An admirable work, this monomyth is dense (maybe sometimes too dense) with Marlantes's gift for lyricism and evocative language.

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 ... 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.

...a sprawling, painstakingly realistic novel about Finnish immigrants ... Marlantes’s epic is packed with intriguing detail about Finnish culture, Northwest landscapes, and 20th-century American history, making for a vivid immigrant family chronicle.

The story is long and has its longueurs, but Marlantes carefully builds an epic world in the forests of Scandinavia and the Northwest, taking pains to round out each character ... A novel that sometimes struggles under its own weight but that’s well worth reading.