⭐⭐
I really wanted to like The North Woods, but by the time I finished it, I mostly felt tired and a bit let down.
The biggest issue for me is the pacing. The story takes an absolute age to get going. There’s a lot of scene-setting, atmosphere-building, and slow circling around ideas, which isn’t a bad thing in theory — I enjoy a patient book when I know it’s heading somewhere. Here, though, it feels like the book is constantly clearing its throat, promising that something significant is just around the corner. I kept thinking, right, now we’re getting into it, only to realise fifty pages later that we were still in the same holding pattern.
And then, when it finally does start to feel like it might kick into gear… it doesn’t really go anywhere. Threads are introduced, moods deepen, tensions hint at something darker or more revelatory, but very little actually lands. The payoff never quite arrives, which makes all that early slowness feel unjustified in retrospect. Slow burns live or die on their endings, and this one just fizzles rather than ignites.
The writing itself is competent, sometimes even nicely restrained, and there are moments where the sense of place is genuinely strong. You can tell the author cares about atmosphere and texture, and I appreciated that on a sentence-by-sentence level. Unfortunately, good prose can only carry you so far when the narrative momentum is this weak. Eventually, it starts to feel like beautifully described stalling.
By the end, I wasn’t angry so much as underwhelmed. I didn’t hate reading it, but I also can’t say it gave me much in return for the time it asked of me. For readers who love very quiet, meandering stories where mood matters more than movement, there might be something here. For me, it just took too long to start and then never justified the wait.
Gareth Ellis - Author 