Hello hello and welcome or welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet. Today I’m sharing my review of The Woods Are Always Watching, a young adult horror novel I read at the beginning of September that really kept me on my toes!
Synopsis
Bears aren’t the only predators in these woods.
Best friends Neena and Josie spent high school as outsiders, but at least they had each other. Now, with college and a two-thousand-mile separation looming on the horizon, they have one last chance to be together—a three-day hike deep into the woods of the Pisgah National Forest.
Simmering tensions lead to a detour off the trail and straight into a waking nightmare … and then into something far worse. Something that will test them in horrifying ways.
Stephanie Perkins, the bestselling author of There’s Someone Inside Your House, returns with a heart-stopping, gut-wrenching novel about friendship, survival, and navigating unmarked paths even as evil watches from the shadows.
Review
The biggest question this book asks is, what’s scarier: man or mystery?
Throughout the book, we are faced with the possibility of the paranormal, but also with the realities of what other people can do to one another. Neena and Josie are tested to the extreme, in ways they could never have predicted when they thought about going on a camping trip.
While the situations that Perkins creates are extreme, the friendship dynamic that is tested under the general pressure of the trip is very realistic; as someone who used to go on camping trips as part of a social group, there is nothing worse than falling out with someone you have to spend the next three days with, all while carrying a very heavy bag, and feeling blisters developing. I still have the mental scars, and the physical ones, from where we got lost and had to climb over barbed wire.
This adrenaline fuelled read makes us think about what we really can cope with, the lengths we would go to for our friends, and what really matters in the long run, the answer being, in this instance, friendship.
If you’re looking for something scary that will keep you guessing, I highly recommend The Girls Are Never Gone, These Deadly Games, and Dark and Shallow Lies.
Thanks for stopping by today, and be sure to come back again soon for daily book content!
And On She Reads 