The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

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🌲 The God of the Woods by Liz Moore ⭐ 3.5/5 — Beautifully Written… and a Bit of a Brain Workout

📘 Buy The God of the Woods on Amazon
Genre: Literary Mystery / Family Drama
Author: Liz Moore
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½
Vibe: Missing children, toxic wealth, tangled timelines, and a mystery so layered you might need a spreadsheet.

⚠️ Trigger Warnings

  • Child death and drowning

  • Alcohol and substance abuse

  • Infidelity and emotional neglect

  • Mental illness and hospitalization

  • Domestic violence

  • Misogyny and classism

🚨 Spoiler Warning

Major spoilers below! I’ll be talking about the ending and the big reveals, so if you want to experience the mystery firsthand, bookmark this and come back later.

🌲 Overview

Let me start by saying: this is a good book. Maybe even too good. As in, academically good. The kind of book that makes you want to underline quotes and then immediately lie down afterward because your brain hurts. 😅

Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods has everything I normally love in a mystery — an atmospheric camp setting, decades of family secrets, an unreliable cast, and that eerie sense that everyone’s lying. But wow. There are so many characters and so many timelines that I had to create an actual chart to track them — and even with that, I still occasionally lost the plot.

🏕️ The Story

The novel begins in 1975, when 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar goes missing from her bunk at Camp Emerson, a prestigious summer camp owned by her ultra-wealthy family. This immediately echoes the disappearance of her older brother, Peter “Bear” Van Laar IV, who vanished from the same property 14 years earlier.

Enter Louise Donnadieu, a counselor at the camp who realizes Barbara’s missing and knows she’ll likely be blamed since she snuck out the night before to meet a boy (classic bad timing). The camp’s director, TJ Hewitt, rallies the staff and calls in the authorities. Meanwhile, tensions rise between the locals (like TJ and Louise) and the Van Laar family, who treat everyone else like hired help.

From here, the story unfolds across three timelines — the 1950s, 1961, and 1975 — and it’s like playing literary whack-a-mole: every time you think you’ve got one mystery figured out, another character and decade pop up.

We learn that in the 1950s, Alice Van Laar (Barbara’s mother) married into the family as part of a social arrangement. Her husband, Peter III, is cold, controlling, and very into maintaining appearances. The only warmth in Alice’s life is her son, Bear — until he goes missing in 1961. The family blames a worker named Carl Stoddard, but his sudden heart attack and death seal the case conveniently fast. Alice falls apart afterward, eventually institutionalized and dependent on pills.

Fast-forward to 1975. Barbara, the “replacement child,” is rebellious, angry, and deeply lonely — and then she disappears. The case falls to Detective Judyta Luptack, a rookie and the first female detective on her force (and honestly, one of the few people in this novel I could consistently root for).

Judy digs deep, uncovering old lies about Bear’s disappearance and new ones about Barbara’s summer romances, feuds, and a certain counselor’s shady fiancé, John Paul Jr.. (He’s the Van Laar godson and walking red flag of the year.)

Meanwhile, the search for Barbara takes on the tone of an epic, complete with police, reporters, and family drama spilling out of the mansion known as Self-Reliance (because of course that’s what the wealthy estate is called 🙄).

As the investigation intensifies, every suspect seems plausible — the locals, the family, even a serial killer named Jacob Sluiter who’s escaped from custody. But the final truth? Much simpler — and sadder.

🕵️‍♀️ The Ending (Full Spoilers!)

Sluiter is captured and leads police to the body of Bear, buried in a cave near the lake. But he swears he didn’t kill him. Instead, he describes seeing an older man hide the body — matching the description of Victor Hewitt, TJ’s elderly father and the Van Laars’ longtime caretaker.

When confronted, Victor confesses the truth: years ago, Alice took Bear out in a rowboat while heavily drunk and high on pills after learning her husband was cheating on her with her own sister. A storm hit, the boat capsized, and Bear drowned. Horrified, Alice went home and the family patriarch, Peter II, forced Victor to hide the body to protect the Van Laar name.

In the present day, the powerful Van Laars are finally exposed — though it’s too late to save Barbara, who’s been missing for weeks. But here’s the twist: Barbara isn’t dead.

Detective Judy discovers that Barbara has been hiding out in TJ Hewitt’s remote lakeside cabin, alive and well. The girl fled on purpose — she wanted out of her family’s toxic orbit. Judy finds her there, safe but determined never to return home, and decides to keep her secret.

It’s a quiet, almost haunting ending — a kind of bittersweet rebellion against the Van Laar legacy.

💭 My Thoughts

Okay, let’s talk feelings:

This book is dense. Not slow, but thick. There are so many timelines, flashbacks, and side characters that it felt less like reading a mystery and more like managing a small town.

That said, the writing is gorgeous, the mood is haunting, and the themes hit hard — wealth, power, misogyny, and the emotional fallout of secrecy. Liz Moore is a stunning writer, and you can tell every single sentence has been fussed over.

But by page 400, I was like: please, I’m begging you, just tell me where Barbara is so I can rest. 😂

👍 What Worked

✔️ Stunning prose — elegant but not pretentious.
✔️ Deep, flawed, believable women.
✔️ Excellent sense of atmosphere — you can feel the damp woods and generational rot.
✔️ Twists I didn’t see coming.

👎 What Didn’t

❌ Way too many characters — felt like reading Succession in a forest.
❌ Constant timeline jumps — just when you’re invested, whoosh, new decade.
❌ Emotionally heavy without much payoff — so many tragedies, so little catharsis.

☕ Final Thoughts

The God of the Woods is the kind of book you admire more than you love. I appreciate what Liz Moore did here — it’s ambitious, layered, and beautifully crafted — but it also demands a lot of mental real estate.

I didn’t predict the ending (or any of the twists), but I also didn’t feel that thrill when I got there. Mostly? I felt relieved that I could finally stop flipping between my character chart and Kindle.

⭐ 3.5 out of 5 stars

Would I recommend it? Yes — but only if you’re in the mood for a literary mystery that’s more about people than plot. Don’t expect a fast thriller; expect a beautifully written puzzle box you’ll both love and resent at the same time.

📚 If You Liked The God of the Woods, Try:

  • The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai – similar emotional depth, layered timelines

  • Long Bright River by Liz Moore – same author, more straightforward and powerful

  • We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz – suspenseful, female-driven mystery

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