Review of What She Found in the Woods

What She Found in the Woods was a genre-spanning book that took a while to get going, then had me hooked. Check out my review of What She Found in the Woods.

What She Found in the Woods by Josephine Angelini. To be published on December 1, 2020 by Sourcebooks Fire.

Synopsis: Running from a scandal at her New York private school, Magdalena heads to her family home to recover under the radar.Over-medicated and under-confident, she’s fearful she’ll never escape her past.Until she meets Bo out hiking. Wild, gorgeous and free, he makes her believe she might finally be able to move on. But when a mutilated body is discovered in the woods, Magdalena realises she can’t trust anyone.

Review of What She Found in the Woods

Have you ever completely changed your mind about a book? I was about to DNF this one. It started out as a girl who got kicked out of her private school for some undescribed scandal and heads to visit her grandparents, bottles of pills in tow. It was taking a while to get going and I wasn’t all that invested.

Then I went on Goodreads and a friend whose opinion I trust said she found the book really different … and good. So I kept reading.

What She Found in the Woods was one part Girl, Interrupted (psychiatric hospital) one part Girl on a Train (impaired and unreliable narrator) one part Deliverance (horror in the woods.) With a romance.

Magdalena (referred to in the story as both Magda and Lena) has been sent to her grandparents in the Pacific Northwest after a stint in a psychiatric hospital. She’s on multiple medications and has been writing in her journal as a way to make sense of everything that’s been happening. Slowly, we get the story of what brought her to this point.

That might actually be enough story for one book, but … there’s more. Lena starts volunteering at a women’s shelter, one where the residents are mysteriously disappearing. She also starts taking long walks in the woods, where she meets Bo, a boy who lives there with his family, completely off the grid. Is there a reason his family is hiding?

Slowly, the threads of Lena’s past and present start coming together as she tells the reader more and more about what happened to her, and becomes more and more involved with Bo and the women at the shelter.

What She Found in the Woods was much darker than the typical YA thriller, and much more complex. (I’m not surprised; Josephine Angelini has written some pretty elaborate YA fantasy with time travel and mythology and dual timelines.) I did eventually guess who was responsible for the murders, but it took me some time to figure it out.

If you are a thriller lover like I am, consider trying this – it was a wild ride and definitely unique!