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In the Woods by Tana French (★★★¾☆)
Jul. 19th, 2025 10:07 pmI don’t know if I loved it or if it just got to me.
This book is like walking through fog and convincing yourself you see shapes in it - some of them are real, some are memory, some are fear. In the Woods isn’t just a murder mystery; it’s a meditation on trauma, buried memory, and the disintegration of self when you try too hard to keep the past at arm’s length.
Tana French’s writing is gorgeous. Not just stylish - precise. Her sentences feel lived-in, like the interior monologue of someone who’s halfway between romanticism and ruin. Detective Rob Ryan’s narration walks that knife’s edge constantly. He’s charming, broken, unreliable, clever, and you know from the very first page that you probably shouldn’t trust him. You do anyway.
The central case, of a murdered girl in a wood eerily close to where two other children (and Rob himself) vanished decades earlier, is as much about atmosphere as it is about answers. The procedural stuff is competent, but what really lands are the emotional shifts: grief, obsession, friendship’s slow souring into something colder.
The biggest risk French takes is not solving everything. The core trauma at the heart of the novel—what really happened to young Rob and his friends—remains unresolved. It’s bold. Frustrating. Unforgettable. I admire the audacity, even if part of me screamed. Maybe that’s the point: some losses don’t close, some mysteries don’t unravel.
Why 3.75 stars? Because it’s too long. The emotional weight is exquisite, but the pacing lags. The final act stumbles a little under its own melancholy. And I know it’s meant to feel unresolved, but there were points where the emotional ambiguity slid toward narrative drag.
But still. I keep thinking about it. The woods, the gaps in memory, the way love and guilt blur in the dark.
This book is like walking through fog and convincing yourself you see shapes in it - some of them are real, some are memory, some are fear. In the Woods isn’t just a murder mystery; it’s a meditation on trauma, buried memory, and the disintegration of self when you try too hard to keep the past at arm’s length.
Tana French’s writing is gorgeous. Not just stylish - precise. Her sentences feel lived-in, like the interior monologue of someone who’s halfway between romanticism and ruin. Detective Rob Ryan’s narration walks that knife’s edge constantly. He’s charming, broken, unreliable, clever, and you know from the very first page that you probably shouldn’t trust him. You do anyway.
The central case, of a murdered girl in a wood eerily close to where two other children (and Rob himself) vanished decades earlier, is as much about atmosphere as it is about answers. The procedural stuff is competent, but what really lands are the emotional shifts: grief, obsession, friendship’s slow souring into something colder.
The biggest risk French takes is not solving everything. The core trauma at the heart of the novel—what really happened to young Rob and his friends—remains unresolved. It’s bold. Frustrating. Unforgettable. I admire the audacity, even if part of me screamed. Maybe that’s the point: some losses don’t close, some mysteries don’t unravel.
Why 3.75 stars? Because it’s too long. The emotional weight is exquisite, but the pacing lags. The final act stumbles a little under its own melancholy. And I know it’s meant to feel unresolved, but there were points where the emotional ambiguity slid toward narrative drag.
But still. I keep thinking about it. The woods, the gaps in memory, the way love and guilt blur in the dark.
