I don't know quite when it happened, but my neighbor's laurel hedge has turned into a towering jungle. For the past month we've been hacking it back to a more manageable size. The activity certainly puts me in the right frame of mind for the two books I'm reporting on this week.

"Tree Soldier" came out early in 2011. It's a novel that focuses on the Civilian Conservation Corps boys of the Great Depression, and it is set in the North Cascades. Whatcom County author J.L. Oakley is an independent scholar and contributor to the terrific Washington State "cyberpedia" known as HistoryLink.org, so this book is rich with interesting particulars about life in the woods.

Park Hardesty is the protagonist - a fellow who has been trying to reinvent his life on the West Coast after making some mistakes as a young man on the East Coast a few years earlier. This long-term stint in the woods is supposed to serve as a self-imposed sentence of hard labor and privation.

But Hardesty discovers that he enjoys the work, not to mention the company of lovely local naturalist Kate Alford.

The jealousy of one of the camp officers, however, along with the provincialism of some of the local fellows, combine in toxic ways to test Hardesty and complicate his path toward redemption.

There may be one or two repetitious conflicts that make "Tree Soldier" feel a mite overlong. And, as the foiled Lothario, Hardesty's CCC superior is disappointingly one-dimensional.

But the rest of the characters are complicated and convincing, and the overall narrative is solid, providing a nice balance of macho rough-and-tumble, romance, and period detail.

I'm always glad to see more Northwest-based fiction, and "Tree Soldier" is well worth reading.

On the nonfiction side of the bookshelf, "Working in the Northwest Woods" jumps ahead forty years, and takes place up and down the Cascades, as well as in the Olympics, the Blues and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Idaho.

Everett-based author Dennis Willard spent a decade working as a forester in the 1970s and '80s, and these essays cover some of the highlights of his wild and woolly career.

If you hazard to hike through these pages with him, you'll find yourself variously crawling on your belly through an unforgiving thicket of blackberries; squishing through a soaking wet rainforest; completely surrounded by trees ablaze with fire; wearing chest-waders and no breathing apparatus while immersed under ten feet of rushing river; and coming literally face to face with a bear.

You'll also get an idea of the different types of jobs in forestry - from fighting forest fires to conducting prescribed burns, and from the pre-commercial thinning of stands to harvesting cones and planting trees.

Willard is an engaging storyteller and knows how to unspool a yarn. This project would have benefited from a sharp-eyed copyeditor, but I'm giving it a thumbs-up nonetheless.

And now: I have to head back out to the laurel!