While Long Bright River was uneven, Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a consistently good read. I can’t say much about the plot without getting into spoilers, but the general thrust is a young girl goes missing at an overnight camp in the 1970s. What follows is an investigation both into her disappearance and that of her younger brother, Bear, who vanished – presumed dead – 15 odd years earlier.
Weaving togethers themes of domestic and gendered violence, of class privilege, of the gap between what appears and what is, and above all of what it means to be “self-reliant” there are moments where these themes read as overdetermined and overly forceful (like the house of the wealthy family is explicitly named Self-Reliance). Though the heavy-handedness sometimes struck me as… heavy handed, at other moments I didn’t mind foregoing the interpretative work and just letting the book tell me what I needed to know and find important.
This directed-ness lends to an utter absorption in the story. With choppy (not in a bad way) chapters that jump in time and perspective, the plot propels while still giving (some) space for (modest) character development. Having just finished hosting a murder mystery, I also appreciated a way played red herring and the tidiness of the ultimate outcome.
It is the kind of book you would love to have with you on a vacation, or airplane, or other occasion where you want to be absorbed and taken out of your physical place. It is not great literature (the writing is good enough to not be distracting and to be occasionally striking, but is not on the whole beautiful; the characters are good enough to be believable and engrossing, but not on the whole complex) but it is good and extremely enjoyable in the way it reminds you that you, yes you, can read for hours at a time and forget where you are and where you need to be until your body reminds you. So put your cellphone somewhere the notifications can’t reach you and sink in.
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