Book Review: What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould

What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould
Genre: Young Adult Fiction (Horror/Thriller)
Date Published: December 10, 2024
Publisher: Wednesday Books

Yellowjackets meets Girl, Interrupted when a group of troubled teens in a wilderness therapy program find themselves stranded in a forest full of monsters eager to take their place.

Devin Green wakes in the middle of the night to find two men in her bedroom. No stranger to a fight, she calls to her foster parents for help, but it soon becomes clear this is a planned abduction—one everyone but Devin signed up for. She’s shoved in a van and driven deep into the Idaho woods, where she’s dropped off with a cohort of equally confused teens. Finally, two camp counselors inform them that they've all been enrolled in an experimental therapy program. If the campers can learn to change their self-destructive ways—and survive a fifty-days hike through the wilderness—they’ll come out the other side as better versions of themselves. Or so the counselors say.

Devin is immediately determined to escape. She’s also determined to ignore Sheridan, the cruel-mouthed, lavender-haired bully who mocks every group exercise. But there’s something strange about these woods—inhuman faces appearing between the trees, visions of people who shouldn't be there flashing in the leaves—and when the campers wake up to find both counselors missing, therapy becomes the least of their problems. Stranded and left to fend for themselves, the teens quickly realize they’ll have to trust each other if they want to survive. But what lies in the woods may not be as dangerous as what the campers are hiding from each other—and if the monsters have their way, no one will leave the woods alive.

Atmospheric and sharp, What the Woods Took is a poignant story of transformation that explores the price of becoming someone—or something—new.

What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould is a story of survival. Many levels of survival: surviving the wilderness, their personal traumas, themselves, each other… and if that’s not enough, throw in a supernatural element as well. The romances didn’t do much for me. I feel like they took away from the story more than benefitting it. Thankfully they weren’t a focus through most of the story. I really wish we would have gotten more from the ending. Like a flash back to the woods with an incident with the search crew or something. Or maybe even having the survivors seeing “something” that made it out of the woods. I don’t know. It needed something. The ending just didn’t do it for me. Overall, I loved the premise. The execution just wasn’t for me.

Courtney Gould writes books about girls, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night. Her debut novel, THE DEAD AND THE DARK, came out Summer 2021 from Wednesday Books and won the Leslie Bradshaw Award for Young Adult Fiction. Her second novel, WHERE ECHOES DIE, hit shelves on June 20th, 2023 and her next YA novel, WHAT THE WOODS TOOK, is forthcoming in Fall 2024. Her writing is featured in Indie Bestselling anthology THE GATHERING DARK and in the forthcoming THE HOUSE WHERE DEATH LIVES.

She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in 2016 with a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, Publishing, and Marketing. She now lives in Salem, OR where she continues to write love letters to small towns and haunted places.

To learn more about Courtney Gould and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Goodreads.

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