What readers think of The God of the Woods, plus links to write your own review.

This may be the perfect summer novel. It's a multilayered mystery about a missing 13-year-old girl at a summer camp nestled deep in the Adirondacks and wrapped around a horrifying domestic drama. And secrets! So many secrets being closely guarded by so many people.

But it's more than that—a lot more. It's also a deftly written and intricate novel with vibrant characters whose very different stories about their troubles and worries and their quests for happiness and purpose in life are just as important as the underlying mystery.

Written by Liz Moore, the novel is told by multiple characters in alternating chapters that bounce around in time but in a way that is easy to follow and adeptly advances the story. From the moment Louise Donnadieu, the 23-year-old camp counselor at Camp Emerson, realizes that Barbara Van Laar is missing from her bunk in the early morning hours of an August day in 1975, the story is a whirlwind that sucks in the reader. The campers are taught on the first day that the forest around them is dangerous. If they are ever lost and alone, they are instructed (over and over again) to sit down and yell.

The camp is owned by a fabulously wealthy family, Peter and Alice Van Laar, whose son, Bear, went missing from the camp 14 years ago in 1961 when he was only eight years old. And Barbara, a troubled, angry teen, is their daughter, so this is no ordinary situation. We soon learn that all is not right in the Van Laar mansion located on the hill above the camp with shocking, appalling revelations about troubled Alice, who has never recovered from Bear's abduction, as well as deceitful Peter.

This truly is a character-driven novel with deep backstories and a richly descriptive narrative for each of them. From the awkward camper, Tracy Jewell, whose only friend is Barbara to the spoiled rich boy John Paul McLellan, who is toying with Louise to T.J. Hewitt, the no-nonsense woman who runs the camp to Lee Towson, the good-looking prep chef with a dark past to Judyta Luptack, a rookie police investigator who is the first female investigator in the state and the only woman on this large team that is hunting for Barbara. Add to this mix Jacob Sluiter, a notorious killer who haunted the area a decade ago and escaped from prison three weeks ago.

And the ending? It's perfect. It's a two-part ending: One gave me the shivers, while the other made me smile.

THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore

Saskia Maarleveld always does an incredible narration. Another favorite narrator of mine. I also paired this with the book.

At an esteemed summer camp in 1975 in the Adirondack Mountains, a young teenage girl goes missing in the middle of the night when the camp counselors aren’t around. Tension and a sense of doom builds as it becomes known that the missing teen is, Barbara Van Laar, daughter of the wealthy family that owns the camp. This isn’t the first time the Van Laar’s had a missing child; Bear, Barbara’s older brother, who was eight, also went missing years prior. The mother, Alice Van Laar, has never recovered from when Bear went missing.

Moore’s story jumps around in time, from the 1950s into the '70s and features a host of characters. There are intricately interwoven plots among the crowded characters of this narrative. A literary suspense/crime read that will keep you reading and guessing.

“As it unfolds, “The God of the Woods” becomes more and more focused on how its female characters break free — or don’t — of the constraints of their time and social class. Whatever the case, breaking free of the spell Moore casts is close to impossible.” A quote from Maureen Corrigan, a book critic

Touching upon family dynamics, secrets, lies, guilt, betrayal, relationships, trust, abuses of various forms, submissiveness, grief, and justice.

There are so many good critical reviews of this book that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. And for the first one-third of the book I kept thinking “this is going to be really good,” but after that it turned into a bit of a slog. The main problem I had is that there are SIX different alternating timelines with different characters in each of the timelines. The timelines go back in forth in different decades. For me, it made the tension of the mystery fizzle. I couldn’t keep track of the characters (of which there were too many) and what part of the mystery they were in. The book really needs a flowchart of characters.

My rating would be 3.5 stars because I thought it was better than average, but it really wasn’t that good. The author writes well, but the structure did not work.