Okay, lots of thoughts on this one. Going to try to unpack them all here.
The God of the Woods starts out really well. I found the beginning to be compelling, with lots of interesting characters and perspectives. But then as the investigation into Barbara's disappearance heats up, a few things started to really bother me, and it went a bit downhill from there.
When it comes to verbosity in a book, readers generally fall into two camps. For some, if they love a story, then stretching it out an extra hundred pages by filling it with lots of beautiful writing but no additional content makes it even better. But for me, my motto is always shorter is better, and fluffing it out to pad the page count doesn't do it for me. So you see where I'm going with this.
What starts out as compelling quickly turns meandering for me. The longer the story went on, the more unfocused it seemed. There are a lot of perspectives in here—I count seven—and every time something was about to happen, we immediately switched to a different perspective, effectively losing the momentum. And when we come back to the original one, the exciting scene had already happened off-page and it's mostly glossed over.
But it isn't just the perspectives, which I honestly don't mind that much. It's also how unnecessarily convoluted the mystery was, in large part due to the way it was written. Every time the police needed to talk to a witness, that person would inevitably end up missing. So we would have to spend time tracking them down just to have a conversation with them. In addition to the two disappearances which are central to this story, I counted no less than six other characters who disappeared at one time or another. It was exhausting.
Surely though, once these witnesses are found, they would be able to answer some simple questions, right? Well, no. Everyone in here lied every chance they had, often for no reason that I could discern and against their best interests. It felt like drama for drama's sake, making the mystery feel even more tortuous and chaotic. You know, just in case the reader thought it was too easy or there weren't enough pages in this book.
My other big issue is that the author has a real knack for writing dumb female characters. It drove me a bit nuts in Long Bright River and here it is again. This time, we have Alice and Louise, two of our main characters, both being portrayed as spineless fools. You guys know I love my female characters to be strong and smart, so to have to read about women who let people walk all over them while making one bad decision after another got old real quick.
Then after all of that (almost 500 pages), this mystery had to be one of the most unsatisfying I've ever come across. Clues were laid out seemingly to point to one direction or another, but then the story disregards almost everything it had said before and ends on something completely different. And some of the clues were never addressed at all, as if they've served their purpose to mislead us and now we can just forget about them.
Still, for all my complaints, I did find this to be a fairly engrossing read. There were many moments I got really into it, and the pages just melted away. But there were also many moments where I could not believe yet another character has disappeared or Alice and Louise are yet again being dumb and weak, and I could just feel my eyeballs rolling around in exasperation.
Clearly I'm in the minority here. Everyone else is loving this, so you shouldn't take what I say too seriously. Sometimes there is just a mismatch between a reader and a book, and that's probably what happened here.
Readaroo Rating: 3 stars
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