I picked up The God of the Woods on a rainy Tuesday, expecting a fast thriller. What I got was something slower, sadder, and more honest. Liz Moore’s novel about a wealthy family’s missing children in the Adirondacks refuses to give easy answers. Instead, it asks: what happens when the people who should protect you are the ones you need protection from?
The Girl Who Refused to Be a Good Victim
The story opens in August 1975. Thirteen-year-old Barbara Van Laar vanishes from her bunk at Camp Emerson, a summer camp her family owns. This isn’t the first Van Laar child to disappear. Her brother Bear went missing fourteen years earlier, never found. The obvious question is who took them. The real question, the one Moore spends 400 pages exploring, is why no one in that family seemed to notice they were already lost.
Barbara is not a sympathetic victim. She’s a punk kid in army boots, wearing ripped stockings and a rude T-shirt. She smokes, she swears, she refuses to be polite. The other campers are terrified and fascinated. Her mother Alice sees her as a replacement for the dead son. Her father Peter ignores her. The camp counselors find her exhausting.
But here’s what Moore does brilliantly. She shows us Barbara through the eyes of Tracy, a meek bunkmate who becomes her friend. Tracy notices that Barbara’s rebellion isn’t confidence. It’s armor. Barbara has learned that if she acts unlovable first, she won’t have to wait for someone else to decide she is. That detail cracked something open for me. I thought about my own teenage years, how I dressed loud and talked sharp so no one would see how scared I was.
The central conflict isn’t whether Barbara will be found alive. It’s whether anyone in her life ever really saw her.
The Woods That Swallow Everything
The novel moves between 1961, when Bear disappeared, and 1975, when Barbara does. Multiple narrators tell the story: Louise, the young counselor who finds the empty bed and becomes a suspect. Judyta, the first female state trooper assigned to the case, who every man dismisses. Alice, the mother drowning in pills and grief. And Barbara herself, in flashbacks that show her trying to survive a family that treats her like a ghost.
The core theme is visibility. Who gets seen in this world? The Van Laar children are invisible to their parents. The working-class staff are invisible to the wealthy family. The women in this story are invisible to the men who control their lives. Moore’s imagery circles around this idea. The family’s summer home is called Self-Reliance, perched on a hill overlooking the camp. It’s a monument to the delusion that rich people built everything themselves, that they don’t depend on the maids and gardeners and counselors who actually make their lives possible.
The woods themselves become a character. They’re described as dark, damp, full of hidden paths and forgotten cabins. People get lost in them. People hide in them. The woods don’t care about class or money or family names. They just swallow things quietly.
The Women Who Show Up Anyway
This book is extraordinary at character. Moore writes women with such tenderness. Judyta, the young investigator, drives hours to work because she can’t tell her traditional Polish family she’s moved out. She’s smart and thorough, but she second-guesses herself constantly. She knows the old male detectives think she’s a joke. She’s right, but she keeps working anyway. I loved her.
Louise, the counselor, breaks my heart. She’s raising her little brother while their mother is absent. She’s in a relationship with a wealthy man who uses her. When Barbara vanishes, Louise becomes the scapegoat because she’s poor and alone. The system doesn’t care about truth. It cares about someone to blame.
The problem is the pacing. The middle section drags. Moore spends a lot of time on family history, on Alice’s grief, on the slow unraveling of the Van Laar marriage. I get why. The mystery isn’t really about who took the children. It’s about why no one protected them. But I’ll be honest. Around page 250, I wanted to skip ahead.
The ending is also controversial among readers. Some find it abrupt, even wishful. I see that. The resolution feels a little too clean after so much mess. But I think Moore made a deliberate choice. She’s not interested in punishment. She’s interested in survival. The ending isn’t about justice. It’s about the small, fragile ways people save each other.
The Silence After the Story
If you love character-driven literary fiction, read this. If you need fast pacing and constant action, skip it. If you’re someone who thinks about class, about how money buys protection and the lack of it makes you vulnerable, you’ll find this novel painfully true.
Read it for the women. Read it for Barbara, who refused to be a good victim. Read it for Judyta, who shows up anyway even when no one believes in her. Read it for the way Moore writes about forests, about the smell of pine and the sound of rain on lake water.
This novel made me think about my own family. Not the dramatic secrets, but the small ones. The times I felt invisible and learned to act like I didn’t care. The way we all perform for each other, hiding the parts that need help.
I also thought about privilege. Barbara Van Laar had money. Her family owned a camp, a preserve, a house called Self-Reliance. But she was still alone in those woods. Money didn’t save her. It just made her disappearance a scandal instead of a tragedy.
“The woods don’t care who you are.” Moore ends with a line that isn’t comfort—it’s a warning. The world doesn’t owe you attention just because you’re rich or smart or trying your best. You have to find people who will see you. And if you can’t, you have to learn to see yourself.
This book won’t solve your problems. But it might make you feel slightly less alone in the moments when you’re trying to be seen.
