Liz MooreLiterary Fiction · Fiction·b. 1983
The God of the Woods
Synopsis
In the summer of 1975, a thirteen-year-old girl named Barbara Van Laar vanishes from her bunk at Camp Emerson, a private camp in the Adirondacks owned by her wealthy family. She is not just any camper: she is a Van Laar, and her disappearance reopens an old wound, because fourteen years earlier her older brother vanished from the same woods and was never found.
Liz Moore braids together the perspectives of the people drawn into the search — a young camp counselor, Barbara's bunkmate, her brittle and grieving mother, and one of the region's first female investigators — and moves fluidly between the 1950s and the 1970s. As the search widens, so does the picture of the Van Laar dynasty and the working-class community that depends on it, each family carrying secrets it would rather keep buried.
Part missing-person mystery, part sweeping family saga, The God of the Woods is a literary novel about class, motherhood, and the long shadows cast by privilege. Atmospheric and intricately plotted, it was one of the most acclaimed novels of 2024.
How it reads
Prose complexity 7/10
Content warnings (7)
KidnappingChild DeathTraumaSubstance AbuseAbuseSexual AssaultViolence
- The lives of several people came to a halt & collided in slow-motion when Barbara Van Laar went missing from Camp Emerson. What followed was a spectacular deconstruction, a deep dive into the twisted family dynamics & thorough exploration of the woods that was the Van Laar Preserve. Any novel that takes its linearity too seriously immediately earns an eye roll from me. I'd much rather prefer to be dropped in the middle of a c•••••••••• & left to fend for myself than being forced to take the tour of the surroundings as if I were in a museum. God of the Woods excels at that. I lived in multiple timelines. I felt the twigs & dry leaves crunch underneath my feet. I breathed in the damp August air & felt a tinge of earthy scent of moss wafting from the nearby lake. But most importantly, I was present in the same room as these characters. There were no flashy gimmicks that mystery authors often use by blatantly giving the 'need-to-know' basis information serving as sort of a 'gotcha' moment. The puzzle was laid bare from the very start. The reader & characters just had to connect the dots together. The novel explores the selfish mindset of rich people with an unwavering focus on the rampant corruption & decadent lifestyle. Self indulgence, sometimes too much, spreads throughout the pages almost like a pervasive virus, crumbling the integrity of every character that mistakenly comes in contact with the Van Laars & their friends. At times, the allure was just too hard to resist, making morality merely collateral damage. I cannot stress how tangible & beautifully grounded the whole experience was, how visceral was the prose and how stratified were the characters. I didn't just read it. I felt every bit of it and then some. Because sometimes we are afraid of love; afraid that it has the power of destroy us so we destroy it instead. So, my heart sank when I read that ending. Who would have known that I'd discover my first 5 🌟 read of 2024 through sheer accident?! Lends credence to one of my favorite mottos : You don't find good things. They find you. Highly recommended 💯 5/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
- This book was as good as promised. So many moving pieces. I would recommend reading this book instead of listening to it because there are so many jumps between who we are following and even what time it is. So if you’re listening and multitasking it can be hard to follow. It took be a little bit to get pulled in, but once I was hooked I was all in! I probably would have been hooked faster if I was reading instead of listening though.