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julesdmuells 's review for:
The God of the Woods
by Liz Moore
Loveable characters:
No
This doesn't keep to just one genre, but it's a murder mystery.
Con:
It falls into unfortunate trends in contemporary fiction: incomplete sentences, written to sound dramatic in your inner monologue but nonsensical and a little amateur, and nonlinear storytelling, which can kill the story's momentum and render great cliffhangers obsolete by making the okay-just-ONE-more-chapter-experience impossible by switching perspectives every time the story gets good.
Pro:
That feeling where it's picking up and getting so good that you need to read all the way to the end started for me about two-thirds in, and once I was hooked I didn't want to put it down and couldn't wait to get back to it.
Con:
The characters should be more believable and diverse. Several women find themselves in the same situations. Several women respond in stress in the exact same ways. Nearly half the men in the book have precisely the same motivations and mannerisms. One ramification was that several women stayed with flat, loathsome partners who abused and cheated on them, not because of any realistic tactics like love-bombing, but inexplicably (and in one woman's case, explicitly just because she's unintelligent). I felt like the entire book contained about 3 personalities, despite having more than 40 named characters, keeping me flipping back and forth going "wait, who?"
Pro:
There's one mystery at the heart of the book, but lots of little puzzles to solve, always a string you could follow to try to outsmart the author. And in praise of this book: I couldn't solve the mystery, so I was engrossed until she revealed it for me.
Con (with light spoilers):
Someone disappeared and couldn't be found not once, not twice, but six times in this book. If this had been because they had succumbed to The God of the Woods each time, it would've been intriguing and compelling, a fascinating way to use the theme we're supposed to take interest in from the very beginning. Instead, sometimes it's just because they drove away and went home.
Pro:
She navigated class and wealth, gender, and sexuality adroitly. A father has to make a difficult decision to ensure his queer daughter can have a future in the 1970s. Generations of wealthy bankers use their household staff as pawns and their wives as social capital. One of the nation's first female state troopers has to work harder than her male coworkers to get usable statements from witnesses. This was a soft spoken theme underscoring the entire book and was very well done.
I'm being almost as long-winded as Liz Moore was in writing this 496-page mystery, but this was one of the uncommon cases where I felt like despite its flaws and my pet peeves, I couldn't help but relish the book I was reading, and I think I'll miss it for a while.
Con:
It falls into unfortunate trends in contemporary fiction: incomplete sentences, written to sound dramatic in your inner monologue but nonsensical and a little amateur, and nonlinear storytelling, which can kill the story's momentum and render great cliffhangers obsolete by making the okay-just-ONE-more-chapter-experience impossible by switching perspectives every time the story gets good.
Pro:
That feeling where it's picking up and getting so good that you need to read all the way to the end started for me about two-thirds in, and once I was hooked I didn't want to put it down and couldn't wait to get back to it.
Con:
The characters should be more believable and diverse. Several women find themselves in the same situations. Several women respond in stress in the exact same ways. Nearly half the men in the book have precisely the same motivations and mannerisms. One ramification was that several women stayed with flat, loathsome partners who abused and cheated on them, not because of any realistic tactics like love-bombing, but inexplicably (and in one woman's case, explicitly just because she's unintelligent). I felt like the entire book contained about 3 personalities, despite having more than 40 named characters, keeping me flipping back and forth going "wait, who?"
Pro:
There's one mystery at the heart of the book, but lots of little puzzles to solve, always a string you could follow to try to outsmart the author. And in praise of this book: I couldn't solve the mystery, so I was engrossed until she revealed it for me.
Con (with light spoilers):
Someone disappeared and couldn't be found not once, not twice, but six times in this book. If this had been because they had succumbed to The God of the Woods each time, it would've been intriguing and compelling, a fascinating way to use the theme we're supposed to take interest in from the very beginning. Instead, sometimes it's just because they drove away and went home.
Pro:
She navigated class and wealth, gender, and sexuality adroitly. A father has to make a difficult decision to ensure his queer daughter can have a future in the 1970s. Generations of wealthy bankers use their household staff as pawns and their wives as social capital. One of the nation's first female state troopers has to work harder than her male coworkers to get usable statements from witnesses. This was a soft spoken theme underscoring the entire book and was very well done.
I'm being almost as long-winded as Liz Moore was in writing this 496-page mystery, but this was one of the uncommon cases where I felt like despite its flaws and my pet peeves, I couldn't help but relish the book I was reading, and I think I'll miss it for a while.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse
Moderate: Alcoholism, Child death, Drug abuse
Minor: Sexism, Blood