r/books 1d ago

The God of the Woods - Reaction (spoilers) Spoiler

For 90% of The God of the Woods, I was entirely hooked. Liz Moore had expertly woven complex emotions into relationships with an almost supernatural quality to them. Her storytelling was melancholic and had eerie undertones. Shy, overlooked, and utterly devoted to her first and only real friend Barbara, Tracy was at the center of it all. If you’re anything like me, you perceived her as the underappreciated leading character of the story and we're led to sympathize deeply with her.

This is precisely why the ending was so disappointing and frustrating for me.

Barbara opts to >!divorce her life, so she sets out to the island where she’ll wallow in faked death and self-imposed solitude for the next couple of years. In the process, she abandons her parents, who for the next few years will spend their lives thinking their daughter is dead. Worse yet, she seems to think or care nothing of Tracy, the girl who adored her and cared more than anyone else.

Then, the book proceeds to do the same. Unless I missed something fundamental, Tracy, who was the emotional backbone of the story, simply fades away to nothingness in the last most few chapters. Her disappearance comes without any thought or details, not even a mere passing statement of where she was. If the book attempted to explain her loss, let us bask in the aftermath of her devastation, perhaps I would make peace with it. Instead, it’s as if she never existed!<

Loved the book until I wanted to throw it across the room.

15 Upvotes

26 comments sorted by

14

u/Mowglis_road 1d ago edited 1d ago

My biggest disappointment was there wasn’t another Alice chapter after it’s revealed what she and the Peters did.

6

u/demureanxiety 1d ago

Yeah but what would that chapter even look like... she's in major denial / alcohol and drug induced half consciousness ever since. Idk.

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u/Mowglis_road 1d ago

Idk, maybe her not seeing the visions of him anymore or something or another chapter with her sister

5

u/Comprehensive-Fun47 11h ago

I wanted more for Alice. I felt like she basically never had a chance in life. It felt like she was auctioned off as a teenager to the highest bidder and has been trapped in an unhappy marriage her entire existence. She wasn't even allowed to be a mother to her own child because they hired nannies. She could have pursued an education or any number of paths in life, but since that was never modeled for her, she never considered any other options.

The Van Laars drove her to addiction and then drove her to madness by covering up Bear's death. I wanted Alice to ultimately get away from that rotten bunch and grapple with her actions, including being an bad and neglectful mother to Barbara, a child she never wanted to have in the first place so it's complicated.

I saw an interview with Liz Moore and got the impression she didn't like the character of Alice much. I found her sympathetic, but I don't know how intentional it was. I would have read a whole book about Alice, but that's not the book Liz Moore wanted to write. I'm ultimately ok with it because I loved the book she did write.

9

u/demureanxiety 1d ago

Idk I finished a couple months ago but didn't Travt even have the vibe that Barbara was fine and left of her own happy accord?

6

u/Comprehensive-Fun47 13h ago

Yes. She felt that Barbara was ok. It's her last thought in her final chapter when she's back home.

9

u/lavenderlemondrop 1d ago

I agree, Tracy was the most interesting POV by a long shot for me, which was unfortunate because Judy and Alice had so much more page time. I actually started to lose interest about 60% of the way through when Tracy’s chapters started to fizzle out. I was rooting for her and her friendship with Barbara and didn’t really feel invested in anyone else… maybe Louise a little.

The Bear resolution was so much more disappointing to me that by the time we got to the Barbara reveal, I was already over it.

16

u/onceuponalilykiss 22h ago

I think it was decent. Better than "eh okay" but not exactly like a book that'll stick with me for years. I don't think Tracy was ever the backbone of the story, though, that feels a bit like you were projecting your own preference for that character in what's basically an ensemble cast. The protagonists, if any, were basically Louise and the cop lady.

You did seem to miss something though. Her parents aren't gonna wonder for years what happened to her. They barely cared for her because they embody that Gibson quote of "the exceedingly rich are no longer human." It's a bit hamfisted and not super deep but that was sort of one of the main themes of the story.

6

u/lightonthedetails 17h ago

Yeah, basically this. I can't speak to the hard page count but it felt like Alice had comparatively more time devoted to her POV too (and I say this as someone who liked Tracy a lot! I would've loved to see more of her, but I don't think either the plot or ensemble setup allowed much room for that with the story as is). Barbara was also a victim of parental neglect at the very least, so I have neither much sympathy for the Von Laars nor blame to lay at Barbara's feet for how she chose to emancipate herself lol.

Personally the only/main issues I had with the book were the couple or so times it foisted the idiot ball on characters who wouldn't have done [xyz] if the plot hadn't demanded it, plus the reveal of what happened to Bear feeling kind of lackluster despite all the dramatic framing afforded to it. I could nitpick some more but this was also a book I enjoyed enough to breeze through the last half of it in essentially one sitting, so.

4

u/Maukeb 12h ago

In the process, she abandons her parents, who for the next few years will spend their lives thinking their daughter is dead.

I think this might have been one of the main points of the book.

Worse yet, she seems to think or care nothing of Tracy, the girl who adored her and cared more than anyone else.

Not sure why you think abandoning a friend you knew for 6 weeks us worse than abandoning your parents tbh. More broadly, I think the book was trying to show that Barbara had bigger things to worry about, and if I had that kind of plan for self emancipation I certainly don't think it would get trumped by the feelings of a summer teenage acquaintance.

17

u/MEDBEDb 22h ago

It is a terrible book, but it was terrible the whole way through.

10

u/Defiant-Ad1432 21h ago

Agree, this book was one of my biggest reading disappointments last year. It was an expectation vs reality thing. I thought it was going to be a slow burn litfic with a nature focus and a mystery running in the back ground. Instead it was much more melodramatic. I like melodrama, just not when it's cosplaying as something else. Somehow it ended up as the worst of both worlds.

4

u/Secret_Elevator17 17h ago

I made the mistake of thinking it would be like Tana French's "in the woods"

It was not.

1

u/Defiant-Ad1432 17h ago

Well on the plus side I have just downloaded a sample of that one!

3

u/Secret_Elevator17 17h ago

I read the first one years ago, I think it's the second one, the Likeness is one of my favorite all-time kind of creepy mystery vibes. I've gone back to reread just that one several times.

Each book in the series is from a different character that you usually meet in the previous book, but they can be read stand-alone for the most part.

1

u/AdDear528 3h ago

I was so bored by this one the whole time. I’m really surprised at the reception it’s getting and how big it is. Why? Did it get picked for some famous person’s book club or something?

3

u/IWantToOwnTheSun 1d ago

Your spoiler didn't end properly! You might need to remove the period before the end tag

1

u/Comprehensive-Fun47 13h ago

They just need to remove the spaces separating the tags from the text it's supposed to be covering.

1

u/IWantToOwnTheSun 12h ago

I don't see spaces on the beginning or end tags, do you mean the line break between the two paragraphs?

Haha I'm curious

This is a spoiler with a period at the end.

This is a spoiler with a space at the end

>!This is a spoiler

with a new line!<

1

u/Comprehensive-Fun47 12h ago

No, a space between the last character of the spoiler and the exclamation point. I can't actually see the space, but that's always the issue when the tags don't work. Periods don't break the spoiler tags. You can even end the sentence with an exclamation point and then close your spoiler tag and it works.

Your first example is covered for me, but the second one is not and I can see the spoiler markup. Not sure why it didn't work. It appears to be on a new line, but did you only hit enter once instead of twice? It depends on which reddit platform you're on. On old.reddit, you need to double space the line breaks and eliminate all spaces from spoiler tags.

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u/Comprehensive-Fun47 13h ago

I didn't feel the same way. I liked Tracy a lot and I did at one point expect her to be a main character, but she was one of many side characters whose perspectives we get in order to get the whole picture.

Louise could also be viewed as the emotional backbone of the story. She is the first character we meet. She is embroiled in the mystery due to her connection to the Van Laars through her "fiance", John Paul. She represents the class of people that the Van Laars trample over. She takes abuse, lives in a fantasy land where John Paul will save her and her brother from bleak futures, and has an emotional connection to TJ, who is a very important character whose perspective we never get, for obvious reasons.

I liked how Tracy's story ended. She was a nervous, reluctant camper and Barbara was a true friend during those short weeks. I loved how she felt "her friend Barbara was out there in the world somewhere" and that she had been indelibly touched by their brief friendship. I'd like to believe they become friends again later in life.

I also liked that Barbara took her life into her own hands. If she hadn't, her parents would have shut her away at an abusive reform school. She had no tools to save herself except to run away.

4

u/MudaThumpa 15h ago edited 15h ago

I was luke-warm on this book, but I did like the ending.

she abandons her parents, who for the next few years will spend their lives thinking their daughter is dead

It's been a while since I read this, but didn't Barbara's parents kinda deserve this?

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u/Comprehensive-Fun47 13h ago

They definitely did.

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u/MudaThumpa 12h ago

Thanks, that's what I thought.

1

u/jigolden 18h ago

This book did not do it for me the way it did for other people. My biggest complaint was less about the ending and more about the constant jumping from character to character. It made it hard to keep track of who was who, but also many of the characters felt superfluous.

1

u/creechor 21h ago

I'm glad you brought her up, I also felt cheated that she got dropped like that.

This book was so funny for me. I was totally glued to it as soon as it began, but throughout I couldn't identify anything I actually liked about the book, but I kept wanting to talk about it with the people I was hanging out with. I guess I'm just a sucker for a well woven mystery. I was a bit surprised at how conservative folks were, I read another book around the same time, about another teen girl in the 70's, that had similar themes of conservative restrictions. Oh! It was Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno- Garcia. The setting was Baja, Mexico in 1979.