This novel by Scott Nadelson, published by the Portland-based Forest Avenue Press, tells the story of a father and daughter living in the Oregon woods.

There is so much to love about Scott Nadelson’s new novel, “Trust Me.” Humanity, humility, and humor — honestly, those were the first three words that came to me, before I realized their alliterative hum.

This is a fish-out-of-water story, about an East Coast Jewish man who finds himself living in a cabin in the Oregon woods. Lewis Nelson bought the cabin a year earlier as a place where his family of three could escape on weekends and holidays.

But that was when he was still one-third of the family. He and his wife have divorced since then, and while she and their daughter, Skye, have remained in the house in Salem, he has landed at this mountain cabin, which means a 45-minute commute (some of it on Forest Service roads) to work every day, capped by a 45-minute drive back at night.

This week’s book

“Trust Me” by Scott Nadelson

Forest Avenue Press — 264 pp — $18

Lewis realizes that several aspects of this arrangement aren’t ideal.

But then there are the 63 hours he’s allotted every weekend when his 12-year-old kid comes to stay with him. And that’s when the cabin seems like the perfect place for father and daughter to forge a relationship going forward that’s between just the two of them.

“Trust Me” is told over the course of a year, as this rebuilding gets underway. It is told in 52 installments — one per week — and the chapters switch between dad’s and daughter’s perspectives.

The story begins on a Monday morning in late September, when Lewis needs to get Skye back to civilization and school, but he can’t find his keys.

It isn’t that he’s untrustworthy, per se, but he does have a track record of being unreliable in the kinds of irritating small ways that can add up. Writing out checks to pay the bills and sealing them into their return envelopes, for example — but then leaving them unstamped and unsent for weeks. Or not showing up for his daughter’s dance recital because he got the date wrong.

Sills — that’s the nickname, short for silly, that Lewis has used for Skye since her birth — is the one who finds Lewis’s keys. He’d left them forgotten in the lock of the door. So typical. Who’s the silly one now?

But for all of his deficits, Lewis can offer his daughter a world beyond cell phone coverage. They take in the seasons of the forest. They hike and they swim, they stomp through the snow. They forage for mushrooms and feed the birds.

They cope with unlicensed plumbing issues and power outages.

They contend with the people who come and go in the rental cabin across the way; with the neighbor who, armed with a leaf-blower, perpetually struggles to keep his patch of forest tidy; and with the weekend ATV riders.

Nadelson beautifully captures the absurdity and busywork of modern life, but he never forgets its poignancy.

And he is masterful in juxtaposing human-scale matters against the rhythms and forces of the larger world.

“Trust Me” is a profoundly wonderful tale.