Stephanie Perkins is the New York Times bestselling author and anthology editor of multiple books for young adults, including There's Someone Inside Your House, Anna and the French kiss, Lola and the Boy Next Door, and Isla and the Happily Ever After. She has always worked with books—first as a bookseller, then as a librarian, and now as a novelist. Stephanie lives in the mountains of North Carolina with her husband. Every room of their house is painted a different color of the rainbow. You can find her online at stephanieperkins.com or in Instagram @naturallystephperkins. You can find more of my reviews of her work here.
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, delivers a heart-stopping, gut-wrenching novel about friendship, survival, and navigating unmarked paths even as evil watches from the shadows.
The Woods Are Always Watching is, first and foremost, a novel about friendship. Neena and Josie begin the novel walking on eggshells around one another. Their bond is fraying, and they're hoping this backpacking adventure is the medicine they need to revitalize their friendship. I love how Perkins wove their anxiety through the beginning of the novel, because it makes the terror of what happens to them more real and relatable. I've also worried about the things Neena and Josie are worrying about, and I could very easily see myself in their unfortunate shoes. Once their worldview is expanded by their situations, Neena and Josie realize how both valid and invalid their blows towards one another were. On the one hand, fighting and resolving frustration is part of having a healthy relationship, but on the other, some things seem trivial when your life is on the line. I love how I could track that evolution for both Neena and Josie, even if they both took different paths to get there. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, I felt that it was tricky to weave between the two girls' fears and narrations, but by the end I felt very connected to each of them, to the point where I was very invested in the future of theirs that we didn't see! More on that in a bit.
While the book is a story about friendship, it is a thriller novel. Where There's Someone Inside Your House felt campy and outrageous, Perkins grounds the horror of this novel in what could really happen in the woods in our backyards. Perkins doesn't pull any punches with the gore, and I found myself literally flinching reading some of her descriptions—they were so visceral and brilliant, so bravo! But what the real horror is isn't just the bodily harm done (although believe me, that is still absolutely horrific). The real horror lies in how these things are happening to girls and women just like Neena and Josie across the country, and how no one cares, or how people only care about specific types of girls and women that are dying and being targeted. Perkins didn't seem to take an activist approach here by any means, but I was incensed after a certain point that things like this are still happening, and that this kind of suffering still exists. This, for me, added a whole new element and angle to the story that I know I won't stop thinking about for a long time.
I think the only thing that really threw me off is the lack of full closure at the ending. We, of course, know that the girls exit the woods with their friendship stronger than ever. I wish that was enough closure for me! I was left wondering if Neena would still leave for college by the end of the summer, and how Josie would figure out her injuries. I recognize that ending the novel with an epilogue either three months into the future or three years into the future might have been cheesy, but I found myself caring so much that Josie and Neena would leave this experience and find their way to thrive that I would have accepted the cheesy epilogue for more closure! So, I suppose at the end of the day, the novel ended right where it needed to, but I'll be wondering forever how Neena and Josie are doing—and maybe part of the point is to think about the resiliency of so many women just like the two of them, and the countless others that weren't as lucky.
I hope Stephanie Perkins is still writing, because I can't wait to hear more about her upcoming projects! Until then, you can find her online at stephanieperkins.com or in Instagram @naturallystephperkins. You can find more of my reviews of her work here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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