A review by bmbpp
In the Woods by Tana French

dark reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

i liked a lot of things about this book, but i'm afraid they're not enough to overshadow the things i disliked. Rob was absolutely insufferable, i know that's part of the point of the book and i myself am a fan of morally gray characters in stories. however, the way his moral grayness was handled just made me uninterested in what he was doing, which is quite a bad thing when you consider he's the main character and the narrator of this book. making him feel the hots for a minor or for someone who he called at least twice "someone he sees as a sister" just makes me see him as a creep. another thing about him that i just found impossible to ignore were the amount of misogynistic comments that are lightly thrown into some of the passages. things like describing a dead child's breasts, putting emphasis on how small and childlike Cassie was, the fact that she's "not like other girls" and the constant stereotyping of women just turned me off. at least he's self aware that he's absolutely infuriating, but for me that doesn't redeem it. i really liked Cassie, she's a well developed character with reasoning and motives, highly intelligent and one of the things that kept me going. the other thing that kept me invested, was the crime itself. i think it was very well handled, the discovery of the whole story was quite shocking to me (take that with a grain of salt because usually when i read books i'm not looking to predict what happens) and even though we never do find out what really happened at the woods i think that was actually a good characteristic of the story. the writing is great, very engaging and descriptive, the dialogue flows really well and is extremely believable. i believe the author has done an extreme amount of research in order to put this together. the fact some of the relationships in the book start falling apart was actually surprisingly well done and shows some consequences to all the fuck ups Rob basically subjected himself to. stunning atmosphere and exactly what i expected from a dark detective book. summing all this up, a big part of this book would've been removed if the communication was better and if Rob went to therapy. i have no idea if i'm gonna continue this series, probably out of curiosity 
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