The God of The Woods by Liz Moore

"Eight campers. Nine beds. She counts and counts again. At last, when she can no longer defer it, she lets one name bob to the surface of her mind: Barbara. The empty bed is Barbara’s. She closes her eyes. She imagines herself returning, for the rest of her life, to this place and this moment ... willing a body to appear where there is none. Willing the girl herself, Barbara, to walk through the door. To say she has been in the washroom, to say she forgot the rule about taking the flashlight ... But Louise knows that Barbara won’t do any of these things. She senses, for reasons she can’t quite articulate, that Barbara is gone" -The God Of The Woods

The God of The Woods (2024) by Liz Moore is very popular right now with readers and critics alike.  And so I had high hopes but my review is mixed.  The writing is first rate.  Liz Moore is a very talented writer and that means alot.

But The God of The Woods is also 490 pages and for the first 300 I found it to be a meandering read.  I had not expected this since the premise of the book, a young girl goes missing at the same summer camp where her brother Bear went missing 14 years ago, had page turner written all over it.  And The God Of The Woods does become gripping but you have to get through more than half the novel before what happened to Bear and his sister Barbara become front and center.  

What happens in the first half of The God of The Woods is flashback, time jumps and extensive character development.  We learn alot about Alice and Peter Van Laar, Barbara and Bear's wealthy parents who own the camp and pretty much the entire upstate NY town where the novel is set.  Alice is a drug addicted woman who has been almost comatose since Bear's death years ago.  Peter is a controlling and emotionally abusive husband.  They are a fascinating couple and so I didn't mind when the novel took a detour to focus on their history.  

But learning the backstory and present day difficulties of Louise the camp counselor and Tracy, Barbara's bunk mate I did not find that interesting. Other characters are thrown in as well and I felt it distracted from the story which is what happened to Barbara?  Finally a police officer Judy Luptak arrives in Part 3 and things pick up. But it takes a long while to get there..

Kirkus gave The God of The Woods a favorable review but also described the book as "A literary novel wearing mystery's clothes".  I think that puts it very well. Liz Moore tackles  important issues in The God of The Woods:- the lives of the working class, family secrets and how being born into wealth changes people and not always for the better. That's all well and good but more than once as I struggled through the first half of this novel I wondered "is anyone looking for Barbara?"