The God of the Woods - Reaction (spoilers)

For 90% of The God of the Woods, I was entirely hooked. Liz Moore had expertly woven complex emotions into relationships with an almost supernatural quality to them. Her storytelling was melancholic and had eerie undertones. Shy, overlooked, and utterly devoted to her first and only real friend Barbara, Tracy was at the center of it all. If you’re anything like me, you perceived her as the underappreciated leading character of the story and we're led to sympathize deeply with her.

This is precisely why the ending was so disappointing and frustrating for me.

Barbara opts to >!divorce her life, so she sets out to the island where she’ll wallow in faked death and self-imposed solitude for the next couple of years. In the process, she abandons her parents, who for the next few years will spend their lives thinking their daughter is dead. Worse yet, she seems to think or care nothing of Tracy, the girl who adored her and cared more than anyone else.

Then, the book proceeds to do the same. Unless I missed something fundamental, Tracy, who was the emotional backbone of the story, simply fades away to nothingness in the last most few chapters. Her disappearance comes without any thought or details, not even a mere passing statement of where she was. If the book attempted to explain her loss, let us bask in the aftermath of her devastation, perhaps I would make peace with it. Instead, it’s as if she never existed!<

Loved the book until I wanted to throw it across the room.