I was looking forward to reading The God of the Woods by Liz Moore because everyone kept reading it and then telling me how great it was. I am not a huge crime-thriller reader, but I am going to rank this one up there with some of the crime-thriller greats that also have a distinct flavor and genre-bend: Gone Girl and Where the Crawdads Sing. This comparison also extends to the real juice inside of these reads: women and how they’re viewed in society. (All three of these books incidentally ended up on the Read Through the States for the Semi-Bicentennial list I made a coupla weeks ago.) I enjoy crime when it has some real meat on its bones (also like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and In Cold Blood). Did I lurve it? Mm. But I at least liked it, enjoyed reading it and would recommend it, emphatically for my husband who was a camper in the Adirondacks himself in the 80s and 90s. So much cultural reference.

Blurb: A camp counselor wakes up in the Adirondacks of the mid-70s to discover that one of her campers is missing. And of all the campers… it’s the daughter of the camp owners. The camp owners, whose son had also disappeared fourteen years earlier. And the grounds are swirling with people: fellow campers, workers from the nearby town, the family in the house up the hill, and all of their perennial guests. But who knows where Barbara has gone? And who made it happen?

This might be a strange place to begin, but there were some simple things done for clarity that I was freaking out about because they were so simple and amazing. For example, having years to head the chapters and putting those years in context is brilliant. I wonder how many authors and publishers will steal this idea. And also giving us the POV instead of a chapter title. I know this has been done before, but I really appreciate it. Why make me figure it out? There’s lots of other things to figure out, and taking away that burden allows me space to learn the characters and the timelines and eventually follow all the clues and red herrings. Same goes for the map, though a childlike, hand-drawn version was a strange choice.

This book is a little slower than your average thriller. Is it even a thriller? Or just a crime mystery? It’s almost as much a family drama as a thriller, and there are a ton of pages (558 in the paperback). Once invested in the characters, though, I liked the more leisurely pace, partly because Woods is an atmospheric book. And not quite the creepy atmosphere that you might expect from the cover mixed with the blurb (or at least what I expected), but the atmosphere of a real time and place and the estate and even the small town and the way the wealthy New Yorkers mixed (or didn’t mix) with the locals and their history. Some people say this book is ultimately about class interaction, and I suppose that is at least partly true. As a genre, it is also historical fiction. But I found, upon reflection, it was even more about women’s disenfranchisement and how that was still playing out in various settings in the 60s and 70s. (Note: all the main POVs are women. The three male POVs are smaller and utilitarian.)

Here are my silly complaints: the pink goo on the cover. I thought it was going to be something really sinister and creepy. Not so much. The title: Moore tells us early in the book that the god of the woods is Pan. She connects Pan with panic, though, and this book is anything but a panic at literally any given point. (If anything, the emotional highs are pretty wooly.) If she had connected him in another way? That might have worked. Dear publishers, I tire of pointless section breaks. I did not need the present tense. In fact, I wanted it to go away. And I don’t think it needed to be 550 pages. I liked all the perspectives and whatnot, but the pace still could have been increased, maybe one of the “cute guy at camp” plotlines eliminated. Then it wouldn’t scare away the regular mystery readers who couldn’t get past the very slow-burn beginning.

Even though I enjoyed reading this and immediately started recommending it (though largely for its capturing of the setting), I was surprised that it stuck in my brain the way it did. I read it early because this May is really swamped with book club books I have to get to, and not small ones either. But God of the Woods has a place in my emotions and also in my thoughts through the characters and some of the plot elements and definitely the vibes. At book club, every person either liked it or loved it except for the one guy who read the first 100 pages twice and was like, “What is all the hype about?” But he’s going to try it again, because two or three other members claimed that they were bored/disinterested for around the first 100 pages and then got really into it shortly after. They all decided that it can read as trope-y for those first 100 pages, too, but that things—especially characters—get much more nuanced and complex as the story continued.

It’s a slow burn, and yet a number of people claim to crash through it in no time at all. (I took a bit longer.) It sounds like you probably don’t want to do the audio unless you have to, because of those helpful chapter headings—without them, a couple of readers were lost, and I can see how that would happen. Overall, a good, solid book that many people will enjoy and then offer up for reader-favorite awards (and already have). And surprisingly, there is plenty to talk about when you’re done reading it. So then, a great book club read, if you can convince everyone to plug in for 550 pages.