The God of the Woods Book Review

Hello everyone and welcome back to the blog! Today, I am back with another book review. I’m so excited for this one; I’ve been seeing this book all over social media. So, let’s get into it!

In this book, we follow the Van Laar family. A rich family that owns a summer camp. In the summer of 1975, their daughter Barbara goes missing. In a very similar manner has to how their son, Bear, went missing 14 years prior. We get glimpses into the Van Laar family and their secrets, we follow camp counselors and employees of the family, we follow investigators as they try to make sense of what is happening.

I loved everything about this book. At 475ish pages, I finished this in just over 24 hours. I love a summer camp theme. This is a perfect end of summer read, a great way to slowly make your way into those spooky fall reads.

The entire tone of the book was very unsettling. We jumped point of views a lot and often being left on a cliffhanger. Every character was so shady, everyone was keeping secrets, etc. While the main problem was that Barbara Van Laar was missing, we dod go off on a lot of tangents to get more insight into the different characters and so we can see how everyone was weaved together. Forewarning, there are a lot of characters in this book. It did take me a minute to remember who everyone was and their relation to the Van Laar family.

I liked the tangents because I liked learning about the family. It was a family with a very interesting dynamic. The way the family treated each kid (Bear and Barbara), the way the father treated his wife, the way the family treated the mother. It was all very interesting. The ending really played into this idea of being rich and blurring the lines with that they could do.

I felt bad for the way Barbara was treated in her family. The difference between her and Bear was night and day. It was heartbreaking that a little girl felt like that and was treated with such disdain. Which brings me to my next point, I think Alice, the mother, was one of the most interesting characters. Her role as a mother and as a wife, her role in the family was all so sad. Sad would be the best way to describe her. For her husband, Peter, to hardly care for her emotionally, to have so little intimacy was crazy to me. I know this takes place in 1975 and maybe women still had a certain role to play, but I think it was more of a rich family thing than social ethics. The commentary on the rich vs poor was wild.

I loved the writing. Even the structure of the sentences was complicated and not something you see all the time. The story structure too was interesting—non-linear, and we go so far back to really get a sense of who these characters are. Every single person had a role to play.

This was another book where I was so enthralled and wanted nothing more than to find out what happened to these kids. It’s a long read, but it felt like it went by so fast.

Overall, I would highly recommend it. I gave this 5/5 stars!

Alright folks, that is all I have for today. Come back next week for another blog post! As always, thank you for reading :)