🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3.7/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read God of the Woods yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
So here is the thing about God of the Woods. It takes its sweet time getting started, and I mean that in the most frustrating way possible. You spend a solid chunk of this book going “wait, who is that again? What timeline are we even in? Why are we here right now?” And then slowly, slowly, it starts to click into place, and you realize there is actually a lot going on underneath the surface. Is it my favourite book this year? Absolutely not. Is it “okay with some interesting bones buried inside it”? Yeah, that is probably the most honest description I can give you.
Set in the Adirondack wilderness in August of 1975, the book opens with a thirteen-year-old girl named Barbara Van Laar going missing from her bunk at Camp Emerson overnight. And here is where it gets interesting: Barbara is the daughter of the obscenely wealthy Van Laar family, who essentially own the entire region, and fourteen years earlier, her eight-year-old brother Bear disappeared from these exact same woods and was never found. So yes, there is a pattern here, and no, it is not a coincidence, and you will spend the better part of this book figuring out what connects those two disappearances considering the two never met.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
Camp Emerson, August 1975
Barbara vanishes overnight, and pretty well everyone is panicking. Her counselor Louise takes the blame for not watching the cabin properly, which is especially unfair because it was actually junior counselor Annabelle who snuck out and got drunk that night while the girls were asleep while she was supposed to be watching them. Louise is a working-class local girl from the nearby town, engaged to a wealthy guy connected to the Van Laars named John Paul McLellan, and from the moment Barbara disappears, the class divide in this book is right there on the surface. The Van Laars own the land, the local economy, and when something goes wrong on their property, it is always the people around them who end up absorbing the consequences.
Meanwhile, the Van Laars are hosting their annual end-of-summer party called “Blackfly Good-bye” at their estate on the preserve. Their thirteen-year-old daughter is missing, and the party goes on. That one detail tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this family.
The Investigation
Enter Judyta, who goes by Judy, a twenty-six-year-old rookie investigator and one of the first female state troopers in New York. She is sharp, observant, and she spends the entire book navigating the overt sexism of her male colleagues while somehow being the only one actually doing real investigative work. Judy does not rely on the Van Laars’ handpicked police liaison. She follows paper trails, talks to locals, and notices when the story people are telling does not match the physical evidence.
There are two main red herrings running through the 1975 investigation. The first is Jacob, nicknamed Limb Jacob, a convicted serial murderer who recently escaped from prison and is rumored to be hiding in the Adirondack backwoods. Everyone assumes he took Barbara, because of course they do. The second is planted evidence: bloody clothes show up in a vehicle connected to Louise and John Paul, pointing suspicion at them for a stretch of the book, and really driving home just how quickly this family will let working-class people take the fall for their problems.
What Happened to Bear — The 1961 Timeline
This is the part of the book where things get genuinely heavy. Bear, whose full name was Peter Van Laar IV, disappeared in August 1961 at eight years old. The family and police always pushed the abduction narrative, and for fourteen years, that story held. What actually happened was this: his mother Alice, already being well chemically managed by the family doctor with sedatives and cocktails, already coming apart under the pressure of being married into the Van Laar dynasty, took Bear out on the lake in a rowboat. The boat capsized. Bear drowned. It was a horrible accident, not a crime, but Alice was so heavily medicated and so deep in shock afterward that her memory of the event fractured completely.
When the grandfather Peter the Second found the drowned boy, instead of doing anything a normal person would do, he coerced camp manager Vic Hewitt into secretly burying Bear in the woods and fabricating the entire abduction story to protect the family name, that is genuinely sad. An innocent man carried suspicion for decades. And Alice? Alice spent fourteen years waiting by the phone, watching the treeline, blaming herself for turning her back on a child she did not even know was dead and becoming more and more dependant on medication. Her husband and father-in-law knew exactly where Bear was buried the entire time. They let her live in that grief-fog, in that open-wound limbo of a “missing” child, just to protect their social standing. That is not just dark. That is monstrous, full stop. However, for her to completely block out that this ever happened seems really odd as well.
Alice’s Story
Alice might be the most tragic character in this entire book, and she is the one I kept thinking about after it was over. She was brought into the Van Laar family not because Peter the Third loved her, but because she was suitable and compliant enough to be absorbed into their world. She was isolated, emotionally neglected, medicated into submission, and then she lost her son in a devastating accident and got gaslit into not being able to trust her own memory of that day. She spent over a decade in a grief-fog that no one around her had any interest in helping her come out of, because her grief was inconvenient for the family image, you’d think a drinking problem would be too though.
Barbara was born about a year after Bear disappeared, specifically conceived as a kind of patch over the hole he left. A replacement child. And Alice, with Bear’s ghost consuming every corner of what was left of her heart, had nothing left to give her daughter. Barbara grew up being measured against a dead saint. Every flaw, every outburst, every act of defiance was filtered through “Bear never would have done that.” By 1975, Alice has decided to ship Barbara off to a punitive reform school after camp ends. And that decision, more than anything else, is what makes the escape inevitable.
What Actually Happened to Barbara
Here is the twist: Barbara was not taken. Barbara planned the whole thing herself. Knowing she was about to be sent away to reform school by parents who barely saw her as a person, she decided she would rather disappear into the actual wilderness than let that happen. She had been secretly learning wilderness survival from T.J. Hewitt, the camp director and groundskeeper, who was the one adult at Camp Emerson who actually cared about her. T.J. had watched the Van Laars destroy her own father Vic with the Bear cover-up, and she was not going to let the same family swallow Barbara whole.
T.J. coached Barbara, staged the disappearance, and transported her to an off-grid family cabin on a remote Adirondack island with enough supplies to last until Barbara turned eighteen. And Barbara, in the sharpest move in this whole book, weaponized the legend of Limb Jacob. She knew the entire search effort would look outward, hunting for a monster in the brush, while she slipped away quietly. The very wilderness the Van Laars used to swallow her brother, she turned into the one place their money and power could not reach her.
Judy eventually pieces together T.J.’s connection to the cabin and tracks Barbara down on her own. She finds her alive, healthy, and thriving. And then she makes a choice: she does not report it. Yay Judy!! She lets Barbara stay free. Because by that point, Judy has seen the full picture, and she understands that returning Barbara to that family would not be justice. It would be handing her back to a gilded cage while the Van Laars swept everything back under the rug.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 No steam here at all. This is a straight literary thriller and mystery. No romance, no heat, nothing of that nature. It is class warfare, family trauma, and cover-ups in the Adirondack woods. Just so you know what you are walking into.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Mixed, honestly. Barbara getting out and Judy choosing to let her stay hidden is satisfying on a character level. The Van Laars do not get a courtroom reckoning and that is frustrating in the way real life is frustrating, but it fits the world of the book.
What gets me is Alice. She does not get anything. No truth, no closure, no release. Bear is dead in the earth miles away, and Barbara chose freezing Adirondack winters over ever setting foot in Alice’s house again. Barbara’s freedom is Alice’s final, total loss, and Alice just stays there in the ruins of the estate surrounded by wealth and silence and the ghosts of both children. Whether that sits okay with you probably depends on how you feel about endings that are emotionally resonant but deliberately refuse to give you the neat resolution you were hoping for. For me, it left a bit of a hollow feeling, which I think was intentional, but that does not mean I had to enjoy it.
Would I Reread It?
No. Not a chance. For a 3.7 rating, I think this book is worth one listen if you are a fan of slow-burn literary thrillers with layered themes and social commentary running through them. But it took a very long time to get going, I was confused for a good portion of it, and once I had all the pieces, I did not feel the pull to go back through it. This is a “read it once, think about it afterward, move on” kind of book for me.
Who Is This For
If you love atmospheric mystery with a lot of generational family dysfunction and class commentary baked in, this is probably going to work for you. If you need a fast pace, a romance thread, or a satisfying moment where the powerful finally get what they deserve in a public and decisive way, this is not your book. Fans of literary fiction that uses crime as a lens for larger social themes will get more out of it than I did, and that is okay.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Standalone | Genre: Literary Thriller/Mystery | Steam: 🔥