by Liz Moore ★★★★★
I had never read a Liz Moore novel before 2020's Long Bright River, and I was immediately a fan. That nuanced thriller about a pair of sisters in Philadelphia -- one a cop, one a sex worker -- was my #8 book of 2020. And so when I saw that Moore had The God of the Woods coming out this year, it swiftly found a spot on my short list of most anticipated books of the year.
The novel takes place in 1975, at a wilderness camp for children in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. The camp is held on the "Van Laar Preserve", a stretch of land that a wealthy family purchased at the turn of the 20th century. The original family patriarch, Peter Van Laar I, established the camp as a way to expose all children to the outdoors, but it gradually evolved into an exclusive place where the wealthy elite of New York and New England send their young ones each summer. The Van Laars live on the property, but they keep a determined distance from anything going on at the camp, never choosing to descend from their home (dubbed "Self-Reliance") to intermingle with the campers. The story picks up in August 1975, when at morning wakeup one of the campers is missing. A missing camper is bad, but in this case the bad just got worse: the missing camper is Barbara Van Laar, the 13-year-old daughter of the purveyors of the camp.
As the search for Barbara commences, author Moore fills in the gaps in the history and characters through flashbacks to 1961 when another Van Laar child went missing (Peter Van Laar IV, affectionately known as "Bear"), and the two months in 1975 leading up to Barbara's disappearance, during which camp was in session. The interlaced mysteries unfold, with character relationships, motivations, and grudges gradually revealed, both from the present day and the past. There's a large cast -- dozens of campers, counselors, police, townspeople, and the wealthy elite who vacation each year for the "Blackfly Good-by" bonanza thrown by the Van Laars, which happened to coincide with the disappearance. To Moore's credit, she makes it easy for the reader to remember all of the players, both major and minor, without turning any of them into one-dimensional placeholders.
Like with any good camp, there are ghost stories that are told. A frequent protagonist in those stories is Jacob Sluiter, dubbed "Slitter" by those telling the stories to drive higher levels of trepidation among the campers. While it's never discussed, many presume that it was Sluiter behind Bear Van Laar's disappearance. He has never confessed to it, and he's currently serving a life sentence in the state penitentiary for his other crimes. The stakes on Barbara's disappearance get even higher when we find out that just a few days before her disappearance, Jacob Sluiter escaped from prison and still has not been located.
Beyond the central mysteries, Moore uses the novel to explore a number of themes, including class and wealth gaps, the always-complicated dynamics of family and inter-family expectations, as well as the slowly changing (in 1975) role of women in society and the workplace. She writes strong and independent female characters, working in male-dominated professions, who are struggling to find their independence in a world that is not fully ready to give it to them. Moore's male characters skew towards chauvinistic, as most men did in 1975, but she peppers in enough supportive and slightly progressive male characters to make her exploration of that central sub-theme one that resonates through the strength of her female characters as opposed to the weaknesses of the male ones.
When I compare The God of the Woods to Long Bright River, I can't help but notice Moore's growth, in both the storytelling and complexity of plotting. The novel is a step up from her previous strong effort, and one that I find myself appreciating even a bit more as time passes since I finished it. Another solid 5-star read from Liz Moore.