Barkskins

I’ll admit: I hesitated before committing to *Barkskins*. Twenty-six hours is a lot to ask, even from a Proulx fan. But within the first hour, Petkoff’s narration—dry as kindling, with a hint of smolder—had me hooked. He doesn’t do voices so much as *textures*: the rasp of a dying Mi’kmaq elder, the clipped efficiency of a 19th-century timber baron, the exhausted monotone of a modern-day ecologist. It’s a performance that trusts the writing, and Proulx rewards that trust with prose that’s both poetic and brutal. The scene where a starving logger eats bark isn’t just descriptive; it’s *physical*, the kind of passage that makes you pause the audiobook to stare at your own hands. That said, this isn’t a flawless listen. The novel’s structure—jumping generations and continents—can feel disjointed in audio. A few transitions left me scrambling to place characters (a family tree PDF would’ve been a godsend). And while Proulx’s unsentimental view of human nature is bracing, the relentless bleakness wears thin by Hour 20. Yet the moments of grace—like a quiet 1980s chapter where a woman plants saplings in a clear-cut—hit like sunlight through a canopy. The production is clean, with no distracting edits, though I’d have loved more atmospheric sound design (imagine the *creak* of a saw, the *thud* of a falling pine). Still, Petkoff’s understated delivery ensures the story’s power isn’t lost. If you’ve ever stood in an old-growth forest and felt the weight of time, this audiobook will split you open like heartwood." "tags": [ "epic environmental fiction