In The Woods

by: Tana French


In Tana French's powerful debut thriller, three children leave their small Dubling neighborhood to play in the surrounding woods. Hours later, their mothers' calls go unanswered. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children, gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.
Twenty years later, Detective Rob Ryan--the found boy, who has kept his past a secret--and his partner Cassie Maddox investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in the same woods. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him, and that of his own shadowy past. {cover copy}
Well, that was depressing. But weirdly, I enjoyed it. Mostly. Except for the whole... real-life-ness about it {that's a word. Just go with it}. I finished it last night and I still haven't figured out the right words to describe how I feel about it. I don't know. I liked the mystery and the backstory mystery but {at the risk of sounding too vague} I didn't want what happened to happen. I held out till the end, hoping what I wanted to happen would happen and when it ended I said, out loud, "Well, that's depressing." And yet I enjoyed every minute of it. Guys. I don't know how to review this. I'm tempted to read the next book in this series, but I'm afraid I won't get what I want in that one, either. But it appears to have a higher rating than this one, so maybe I should. I would like to read more of this character because I like the voice, but I don't know. Wow, this is the most wishy-washy review of all time. So I'm gonna go with: Satisfyingly Unsatisfying. Yep. That's what I'm saying about this. Oh, but I will say this, the opening page is beautifully written. The description is now easily my favorite description of a season ever.

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. {first line}
"...I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor."

"Humans are feral and ruthless; this, this watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man's fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most polished and highly evolved form."

"I have always had an excellent brake system, a gift for choosing the anticlimactic over the irrevocable every time."

"We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be... Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself."

"...tragedy is new territory that comes with no guide."

"Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with."

"I had thought, only a few minutes before, that there was no way I could feel any worse and still survive."

• car • {last word}
{view on Goodreads}