Reviews with content warning for Infidelity - El dios de los bosques

Years after her brother has gone missing, Barbara goes missing from her family's summer camp.

This is both a mystery about what happened to the kids and an exploration of misogyny in the 1970s. We get to see the treatment of women in not only various stages of life, but also various social economic standings. In this, she explores generational wealth, gender, and misogyny. She also explores the idea of class divide between the rich who summer here and the townies who live here year round. We get an insight into the differing treatment of the two groups. There's also the exploration of dysfunctional parent-child relationships as seen through many of the women in this story. This theme is weaved throughout every storyline in this book.

It was an interesting choice to set this in the '70s because we get two very different groups of women, those who are the older generation and are still controlled and gaslit by men and the younger generation who are fighting against that. We have characters like Barbara, Judy, and TJ who don't fit into the stereotypical role of" a woman" in the '70s. Then we have women like Louise and Alice who are still being controlled by the men in their lives. It's a very interesting dichotomy.

All this leads to a very interesting plot, that said, there's a lot of unnecessary storylines and information in this book that doesn't add to it. For example, we get Louise's story and a lot of information about her family, but this story doesn't lead anywhere. It just acts as a distraction. I get it serves to highlight the preferential treatment that the rich gets from the police, but we don't get a resolution, so why is it there? There's too many questions left unanswered about her. The same can be said for Tracy.

I have mixed feelings about the ending of this book. I think the resolution of Bear's story was anticlimactic.

The alcoholic mother took her son in a canoe on the lake when it was storming and he drowns. The grandfather, father, and groundskeeper cover it up, bury him in the woods, and lead police in the community on a goose chase pretending he is " lost ". All the while framing an innocent man for his "disappearance ".

Where as I think Barbara's story led to a more thought-provoking ending.

Barbara hates the life she has and spends the summer with TJ planning her escape. In the end, we find that she has escaped to TJ's family's cottage in the woods and is living on her own terms. I think this is a really interesting way to end her story, Barbara desires freedom from her family, from the misogyny, from the expectations, and the wealth of her family. She gets all those things in the end.

Content Warnings

katharina90's review against another edition

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dark hopeful mysterious sad slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

4.0

Not really a mystery/thriller but an exploration of characters, their relationships with one another, their choices and the consequences of their actions. Almost, but not quite, literary fiction?

Strong sense of place, with parts of the setting taking on a character-like quality (e.g., Self-Reliance house).

Many POVs across time. Having the timeline laid out at the top of every chapter was really helpful.

Both heartbreaking and hopeful. The message I was left with was about living authentically/on your own terms and finding "home" (love, care, belonging) outside of abusive biological family and oppressive societal norms.