The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force more than a father and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at fourteen by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes to adulthood, enlightened and enlivened at various points by an unforgettable triumvirate of intoxicating women, he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers’ rapacious destruction of the wood of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as well as the working people who made their wealth possible. With over thirty years of searching for the truth of what his family has done and trying to make amends, David looks close at the root of his father’s evil—and threatens, like Icarus, to destroy himself.
