Reviews with content warning for Cancer - What Lies in the Woods

I've seen this book all over bookstagram with rave reviews on how good and twisty it was and it was plumped with a lot of my favorite thrillers so best believe I was excited when I finally got my hands on it. Well, sadly this book fell flat for me.

It took until we got pasted the first 100 pages for me to actually get excited about what was going on.

aka Noami they found that Liv died and now she's trying to pick up where Liv left off

After that, that's when I think the story actually picked up. And I was pretty interested. I was finally seeing what people were talking about, but that feeling was later shot (no pun intended considering what happens 😂) the last 50-ish pages.

The twist that it had been Liv that stabbed Naomi was very underwhelming and quite frankly made me upset. I thought we were past stigmatizing mentally ill people as violent psychotic potential killers. I'm glad the author later corrected this assumption.

I also, guess many of the twists.

I wasn't surprised when we found out that Ethan was AJ and that Cass was involved in the end, and that she manipulated Liv into stabbing Noami and then took it upon herself to finish the job. I do have to admit I didn't guess that Cody would be involved and that he accidentally killed Jessi.

This usually isn't a factor in how I rated books. I don't really care if a thriller is predictable as long as I'm having a good time and the suspense is good, however, due to how much this thriller was hyped I was expecting the twists to be mind-blowing so I was highly disappointed which made for a not-so-good reading experience in the end. Lowkey felt like the author added these twists for the sake of their being a big twist. I just don't think it correlated with the story well. I also felt like the ending was a bit rushed.

Now, I didn't hate this book by any means. It has a lot of entertaining components and a decent amount of suspense to make you want to know more. However, if you read this I don't want you to go in expecting anything crazy or phenomenal. I feel like if you're looking for a basic thriller with a decent amount of suspense and a not-so-crazy plot twist then you may consider giving the book a try.

Content Warnings

theaceofpages's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Oooh this was a good book. I was a little bored and uninterested at the start, but once the plot started I was hooked. Naomi was attacked in the woods when she was eleven and very nearly died. She remembers nothing of the attack, but her two best friends tell her that they know who the attacker was so she helps send him to prison. Naomi returns home to see them after she hears of her attackers death. After

one of them dies under mysterious circumstances in the very same woods that she was attacked in

, Naomi decides to look into the past and try to piece together her own memories of that day. With the help of a podcaster who came to town to interview the Naomi and her friends, she starts to uncover far more than what she bargained for.

The author is very talented at building up suspense and evidence. She slowly builds up a logical argument and quickly breaks it down again. While I did see one or two of the twists coming, this book managed to surprise me more often than not. I appreciated the deeply flawed characters and our clearly unreliable narrator. The latter definitely contributed lot to the mystery and intrigue of the story. While I didn't find any of the characters to be likeable (most of them annoyed me actually and I would have wanted to throw something at them more than once if they were people I knew in real life), they were well-written and believable - something that is definitely more important than likeability in a good story. It was very frustrating that nobody seemed to want to go to the police, but that they would rather do it all themselves. I also loved that the author touched on the issues of confirmation bias and corruption as these are definitely real issues in the legal and criminal industries. I feel like she has built and ingrained these in the story in an incredibly effective way (even we become guilty of it multiple times).

I can definitely recommend this book if you are interested in a small town mystery full of questions and twists with an unreliable narrator. Once the plot gets started you are in for a crazy ride as you dive into the past with Naomi.

Some notes on some of the content warnings (all are spoilered individually so you can only look at those you are interested in)

Mental illness:

Naomi struggles with PTSD nd Olivia, one of her friends, is also mentally ill

Gaslighting:

Naomi's friends and the media have muddled up what she actually remembers and what she was told happened. Trying to disentangle this is an important part of the story.

Sexual assault/violence/pedophilia/adult-minor relationship:

Nearly exclusively things that happened in the past. For example, Naomi was sexually assaulted as a child. Her ex also tries to come onto her but she pushes him away.

Medical content:

Naomi's treatment

Cancer:

The man accused of being Naomi's attacker died of cancer.

Xenophobia:

Anyone from outside the town is seen as lesser. This impacts the treatment of the new police chief, who is just tryin to do her job.

Content Warnings

kris386's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

3.0

Content Warnings

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