Taylor Swift and I Both Read This Best-Seller...and I Have Thoughts

Earlier this year, it seemed I couldn’t escape God of the Woods. When it debuted in 2024, Jimmy Fallon chose it for his book club, and Barak Obama followed suit, naming it one of his favorite books of the year. Since then, I must have clocked it on the subway at least a million times. My friends were talking about it. Its Goodreads profile has a staggering 699,800+ ratings with a 4.1-star average rating. Not to mention, the book was the Winner for Readers' Favorite Mystery & Thriller (2024). And to top off its staggering popularity, even Taylor Swift couldn't resist being pulled into the mystery. In her new docuseries, The End of an Era, the pop star is filmed listening to the audiobook version.While I’m normally a classic lit gal, eventually, curiosity got the better of me. And I gobbled up the nearly 500 pages within a week. Here are my unfettered thoughts.

At 490 pages, you may really want a TL;DR. So here it is. The story has an explosive start: 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar goes missing while at summer camp. The first catch? She’s the daughter of the camp’s owners and the surrounding town’s wealthiest family. The second catch? Fourteen years prior, her brother, Bear, disappeared into the same woods…and was never found. As the manhunt ensues, readers meet a cast of characters with their own motivations and longings. Tracy, Barbara’s roommate, is feeling lost in the wake of her father’s new relationship. The Van Laars, who have never been on good terms with their daughter. Judyta (pronoucned joo-DIT-ya), a novice policewoman who finds herself defying her family’s expectations. All these worlds converge in a race against the god of the woods, who will determine Barbara’s survival.

The God of the Woods takes place in the Adirondacks, and there are languid and lush descriptions of the landscape, including many a lake party, cabins and summer camp antics. Forest romps, humid summer weather. A touch of New York society history. For context, the Van Laars are on par with, or in the social circle just below, the Rockefellers or the Vanderbuilts. That’s to say, there’s money, and plenty of it. New York apartments and Albany estates. It’s a glimpse of the moneyed east coast elite, as told through multiple perspectives spanning the 1950s to the ‘70s.

Disclosure: While I am an avid reader, I consider anything over 320 pages to be a big investment of my time. Hence, at 490 pages, The God of the Woods had a lot to deliver. On this point, I thought that the principal characters (Barbara, Judyta) were well developed and had satisfying conclusions to their storylines. Granted, I think that for clarity and brevity’s sake, Moore could have cut some of the lesser characters, but ultimately, I did have a sense of what every character wanted and needed, and their arc in the book. That’s a tough feat to achieve, especially with the amount of detail we were given.

The book has two mysteries to solve. Where is Barbara Van Laar? And what happened to her brother, Bear? And how does the god of the woods lead to them both? Until the end, I was guessing and could not put my finger on who or what had caused the disappearances. Of course, I had my speculations, but Moore did a good job weaving a fine thread with enough red herrings to keep me engaged.

Don’t @ me, but I found that the revelation and answers to the mysteries were a little bit underwhelming, especially for a book creeping on 500 pages. It’s not just me; a couple other people I talked to mentioned the same thing. For such a mammoth tome, we were expecting something insanely shocking. However, that’s for you to decide for yourself—I know that at least one PureWow staffer has read The God of the Woods and fundamentally disagrees with me.

This year, Moore’s 2020 novel, Long Bright River, premiered on Peacock starring Amanda Seyfried. I can totally see The God of the Woods adapting itself to the small screen, too. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up on the rest of Moore’s oeuvre.