The God of the Woods
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I had high expectations going into this one. Obama listed The God of the Woods on his top reading list of 2024 and The Readheads Book Club rated it highly on their November 7th episode. As a liberal pining for the days of yore and a Toaster (find you a girl who can do both lol), I knew this was a book for me. So, I was taken aback when I found myself floundering in the first ~50 pages.
It’s hard to get yourself oriented in the beginning. The POV changes not only between characters but between time periods. The book also centers around two disappearances at the same campgrounds, so it’s a lot of overlapping material to digest. While initially annoyed by the back-and-forth, I ended up appreciating the jump in perspective. It led to more suspense– one chapter ended and you had no idea when it would get picked back up and resolved. This could have become hella annoying but Liz Moore executed it well.
Liz Moore managed to pull something off here that’s easy to appreciate but hard to articulate. The book is both character and plot-driven and although the plot got us where we needed to go, I was so swept up in the characters that I honestly didn’t care how it ended. I think I would have been happy with all sorts of outcomes. Rather than nitpicking the specifics, I was just along for the ride, happy to see how each character fared. Moore writes with such vividness, rooting us in person and place without waterboarding us with conventional imagery. It is set in the Adirondacks, and I could clearly visualize the entire novel without suffering through six paragraphs about the texture of the trees. Moore could make the mundane sound fascinating but she doesn’t beat us over the head with minutiae. Her prose jumps off the page.
Overall, I enjoyed Moore’s writing, but I’m not sure that the story entirely met the hype. The mysteries were well-layered such that it was less about the whodunit and more about the intermittent puzzle pieces that led to the situation at hand, but at times, they became too convoluted. She stuck the landing well but the journey there had a few too many lulls to be a full five-flamer. It receives 4 out of 5 flames.
