What people are saying

  • The Toppled Ash is a story one begins and never wants to stop, a fully realized past world of language and poetry, forest and love and loss. The book turns out to be a soothing dream, so beautifully and patiently realized I scarcely noticed myself falling under its spell.

    — Daniel Duane, author of Lighting Out: A Golden Year in Yosemite

  • Mythic, a richly textured tapestry woven of brilliant and mysterious threads, a world whose characters feel timeless, yet fresh and engaging. The Toppled Ash reaches beyond the constraints of a conventional narrative, into the primordial, into the wellspring of ancient dreams and visions.

    — Lillian Howan, author of The Charm Buyers

  • In The Toppled Ash we enter a world that was once timeless and forever just at the moment the sacred tree that rooted and wove together the villagers crashes to destruction.  Not from a storm or axes, we learn, but on a still and windless day.  We overhear two friends wagering what its fall means for the future of their people. Uprootings. Up-endings. Unfathomable changes of direction and course. And so the scene is set. We enter into the mythic, a story truer than true, speaking also to our own era of up-rootings and up-endings, familiar paths no longer trusted. Thus The Toppled Ash is a master story-teller's wisdom tale both for our time and for the time ahead.

    — Sherry Ruth Anderson, author of The Feminine Face of God and The Cultural Creatives

  • Kristina Grondahl’s beautifully wrought tale of sacrifice and redemption, of quest and exile and transformation, offers us “legend and meanings drawn from seasons and earth and the orbits of stars.” A gifted boy talks to his village’s huge, fallen, sacred ash tree. And the tree answers him, “its speech the tremble of bruised leaves craning sunwards.” On these magical pages, rooks fly “swiping the sky clean.” In a graveyard fog sinks “swiftly down onto the bones of the dead themselves with its restful and gentle cancellations.” A woman stands in a ring of giant sunflowers placed around her by her beloved. Within “the circling embrace of so many suns,” she’s “wreathed and uplifted entirely by love.” Page after page, Grondahl’s mythic saga sings to us like the incantations of a timeless bard, teaching us to “never forget how whole worlds wait for us in the smallest of places.” The Toppled Ash reverberates like “the keening wind itself—a wild song about love, forgiveness and benediction.

    — Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita