What She Found in the Woods was a bit of a mixed bag for me. First off, this book is targeted for ages 14 and up. The book has a lot of graphic violence and gore that I think will be too much for some teen readers. (Frankly, some of it was too much for me.) The heart of this novel revolves around two things: An unreliable narrator with a mental illness; and an unsolved series of killings. I’m not sure the author fully pulled off her premise: some of the protagonist, Lena’s, actions, just didn’t make sense. For example, she invented a fictional friend and a fake after-school club to get out of volunteer work, other school clubs, etc. I found it a stretch to believe that this farce ever succeeded, not to mention it took up much more of Lena’s time concocting all of these lies than it would have for her and her friends to just go do their volunteer work, etc. Many other aspects key to the story were a stretch—the grandparents who allow Lena to wander from dawn to dusk with no concern for her whereabouts, the housing set-up of the family in the woods, etc. And, the first 30-40 percent of the book was slow. That said, the pacing picked up in the second half and I was anxious to see how the mystery would be resolved. I will say that the premise here was very ambitious, if not always successful for this reader; I did really enjoy the journal entry format, and the unreliable narrator was well-executed.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Fire for this ARC copy in exchange for an honest review!

This book was a solid YA thriller!! It wasn’t the best, but it definitely wasn’t bad! The tropes were well done in my opinion, and I didn’t see the end coming at all which surprised me!! Usually I can guess YA thriller endings pretty early on, but this one snuck up on me!

It was a really quick, easy read and I would definitely recommend to fans of the YA thriller genre!

I am a lover of thrillers; it doesn’t matter if they are YA or adult or if I’ve seen the trope before. I’ve read all of Josephine Angelini’s YA fantasy books and loved them so when I saw that she was writing a YA thriller? Yes. Please.!

What She Found in the Woods has everything I look for in a thriller. Suspense, mystery, red herrings, unreliable narrator, lies and manipulation. Magdalena is a girl with a dark shameful past but this is all revealed slowly and cleverly through Magda’s journal entries and her real-life revelations. After spending the last 9 months in a mental hospital, Magda is released to her shallow grandparents in the Pacific Northwest. She spends the majority of her free time in the surrounding forest at a spot that is calming to her. This is where she meets Bo, a wild and beautiful boy that she feels an immediate attraction to. But Bo has secrets, too.

The pacing was perfect, moving along with clever plot twists and reveals, never really giving anything away until the end. The guessing throughout of other characters agenda’s or motivations is one of my favorite things about thrillers. I was never quite sure who Magda should trust or if she was trustworthy herself, even though I was really drawn to her as a character.

There are some delicate social issues within the book; drugs and drug dependency, mental illness and the stigma that goes with it. The lack of support from friends and loved ones in these settings or the manipulation of someone who is in just such a situation, is soul-crushing.

This is a four-star read for me and I think that anyone who enjoys the genre will definitely enjoy What She Found in the Woods.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. I'll be posting my review on Goodreads and Amazon

I made it through 10% before deciding to not finish this one and I hated doing it because the summary seemed intriguing. I wasn't a fan of the writing style. There wasn't much description and the sentences felt like stage directions in a play instead of a sentence. They were very short and choppy. There wasn't much dialogue to enhance the story after a few chapters and after Magda meets the mysterious but hot woods guy, I couldn't take the story seriously anymore. The lower starred reviews on Goodreads agreed with my thoughts and I didn't want to force myself to read it when I knew I wasn't going to like it.

What a great book. Weaves in and out of the life of a teenager recovering from a deep trauma. Powerful characters and flowing story. Finished in a day and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it!

What She Found in the Woods got a lot darker and way more disturbing than I was expecting. It was a well written thriller with several twists and turns to keep the reader off balance but a good deal of the subject matter felt more like adult content to me than YA.

Thank you Sourcebooks Fire and NetGalley for access to this ARC.

Freshly released from a nine-month stay at a mental hospital, our heroine Lena (or Magda) goes to live with her grandparents, where she hopes to salvage some semblance of a normal life. Through excerpts from her journal, the reader gradually learns of what brought her to the mental hospital and how she has used words throughout her life to manipulate people and to seek revenge. Yet, our growing horror at what she has done is tempered by the fact that Lena seems to want to change and makes no excuses for her past actions. She is no sociopath. And yet, when her grandparents' small town is plagued by a series of murders to which Lena is closely tied, her twisted past is enough to raise doubts in the reader's mind: Could she have committed these crimes? Could everything that we have read up to now about her present situation be a lie? The author masterfully raises these questions. However, the build-up to the resolution of the mystery is so much better than the actual ending that the reader cannot help but feel disappointed at the end. What initially had a high degree of believability suddenly becomes quite ludicrous when our heroine demonstrates skill sets that even her admittedly twisted past would not have afforded her. While I applaud the author for giving this YA mystery a complex heroine who defies easy categorization as good or evil, the ending, at least for me, undermined what up to that point had been an engaging story.

I was a little surprised to see this book not pushed as much as her last series. I think that it is an well written thriller for young adults that will be very popular. It does start a little slow on the pacing, but that doesn't last long. It has a great set of characters and it a fast, thrilling read.

This book started off a bit slow, but one it picked up it didn't stop. It was full of twists and turns and didnt shy away from the darker tone that some YA thrillers never quite reach. I found this a really enjoyable read and would definitely recommend to most YA readers

I haven't been this sucked in my a YA novel since gulping down We Were Liars in one sitting.

Magda is a former party girl from New York high society that gets exiled to live with her grandparents in the Pacific Northwest after a major public fall from grace and a subsequent hospitalization. She splits her time between volunteering at a women's shelter and hiking in the nearby forest. While in the woods, she meets a guy her age that was raised in the wilderness and quickly becomes intrigued by him and his family's alternative way of life. When she hears rumors in town about a murderer that kills women in the woods, she starts to question whether or not her new love interest might be as innocent and untainted by society as she thought.

Here are a few of the things that made this novel so compulsively readable:

-The pacing, split timeline, and voice were all flawless.
-I'm always hesitant to pick up thrillers that include addiction and mental illness. The author handled both of those things in a way that was thoughtful, sensitive, and informed. (I particularly appreciated her notes about why she chose to write about opiate addiction in the back of the book.) Instead of adding to the stigma around people that are already suffering, the author shed some light on the way those populations are treated as disposable without being preachy.
-While I've seen a few reviews mention that the attraction between Bo and Magda was too much like insta-love, I disagree. I found their mutual curiosity and chemistry to be fully fleshed out and believable. (Plus, Bo's total lack of toxic masculinity was refreshing.)
-Madga is a character that would be easy to write off as unlikeable given her past wrongs, but the author made me genuinely care about how her story played out.

I'll definitely be going back to pick up Josephine Angelini's backlist books!

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.

I liked this book, although I did find it a bit slow-going at first. Also, unfortunately, other reviews set my expectations too high, so I was expecting to have my mind blown or whatever. Still, though, I enjoyed the read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Fire for providing this review copy.

This was a great read! I had so much fun reading this story and all it's twist and turns. The story revolves around Magdalena, who is moved in with her grandparents after a huge scandal in her New York school and her parents divorce. Still reeling from everything that has happened Magda is trying her best to get by day by day in her new home. Things start to look up when a mysterious boy named Bo literally lands on her. But just as things are looking up dead bodies start to turn up and Magda starts to question everyone around her, even herself. The story deals with mental illness, physical and emotional abuse, drug abuse, self harm, discussions of racism, and eating disorders. The way the story unfolds itself is interesting as Magda isn't a reliable narrator and we learn more and more about what has happened to her in the past that affects the present through small glimpses as the story goes on. The mystery was a unique one and I really liked the way it played out. The romance between Bo and Magda was very sweet and I liked how much they cared and took care of each other. Overall, I had a lot of fun reading this book and would definitely recommend it!
* Thank you Netgalley and Sourcebooks Fire for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

Sooooo much better than I was expecting!

I’ve never read anything by this author, but what an intro!!!

Dark, twisted, delicious.

I love the flashbacks. These are my favorite parts of good thrillers. Especially at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

I didn’t love Lena, but for whatever reason, that made me love the story more.

I also really loved the journal pages. They brought a cool, almost ‘presence’ tothe book.

What She Found in the Woods lingers with you long after you've finished it. Haunting, twisted and dark it draws you in from the first page with it's flawed but relatable characters and it's well-paced plot that has so many twist and turns.

This was an excellent book that caught me right from the first page. The author did a great job capturing the voice of Magda, and creating a sympathetic yet flawed character. I wasn't expecting to see the story evolve into such a dark mystery that kept me rushing to find out what would happen next. This felt like a true thriller and romance mixed into one exciting story. I will absolutely buy this book for my HS library and recommend it to any of my students who are looking for a suspenseful story!

WOWOWOWOWOW.

This book was an EXPERIENCE.

A dark, twisted, disturbing, all-consuming experience.

My mind is still twisted and knotted and tangled. I am still unsure what’s real and what’s not real; what’s true and what’s not.

Initially, I wasn’t really sure how I felt about this book when I first started reading it. It wasn’t that I was bored, or un-intrigued, it just wasn’t what I was expecting, and I wasn’t sure what I was in for exactly. So I had mixed feelings about it, but that didn’t last for very long!

This book is pitched as being a thriller, and while it definitely is a thriller of sorts, it’s definitely a very unique type of thriller (but not in a bad way!).

It was a slow burner type of thriller, very atmospheric, one that creeps up on you little by little, until suddenly, it just hits you and you’re like OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING?! But it does take a bit to get there. And while I didn’t mind the slow build, I think it’s important to note, for anyone who is looking for a very fast paced, edge of your seat thriller from start to finish.

This book also is very much mental health focused, as it delves into several mental health conditions and issues, but its done well, and is interwoven into the story very cleverly.

Really, this book, when it comes down to it, is a bit hard to explain, as its best to go into it completely blind, for the best possible reading experience. I really had no idea what was truly in store for me before diving into this story, and I was completely blown away.

And although this is at first a slow burning, creeping up on you type of story, once it really gets to the meat of the story, SHIT GETS REAL.

This book is downright creepy and disturbing.

The mysteries. The disappearances. The strange boy in the woods. The unreliable narrator with her unstable state of mind and peculiar journal entries.

This book ended up being absolutely fantastic. It was brilliant, in fact. I can honestly say that I have never read anything quite like it before. I wasn’t completely sold and blown away at first, but once I was completely absorbed into the story, I was utterly freaked out, wondering what the heck was going on, and how it was all going to tie together.

This was an excellently woven together story, with a complex and smart plot line that was both unique and fresh.

I was completely gripped, and by the time I was finished reading I was like, “What the hell did I just read?” but in the best possible way.

If you’re looking for a dark, atmospheric, disturbing read that will chill you to your core and haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page, then this is the thriller for you.

So good! Recommend recommend recommend

I spoiled myself by first reading the author's note/acknowledgements at the book's end. But even that doesn't hint at how bloody absorbing this story is.

WHAT SHE FOUND IN THE WOODS is self-aware of the racism and classism that forms a key part of a subplot. The novel itself is like Alex Mallory's WILD meets Stephanie Oakes's THE ARSONIST, but is a strange and alluring beast entirely of its own. A bizarre lifestyle, family secrets, DIY heart injection, and the bond of staff at a women's shelter combine to make a winning combination. Part of it all is Magdalena, a flawed character who's done well-meaning but awful things. She's aware she isn't owed anyone's forgiveness or approval, but finds meaning in herself via volunteering at a women's shelter. Her friendship with fellow staff member Gina may be unusual, but they've got each other's backs.

The author writes that this book is "unusual" for her. I hope Josephine Angelini writes more psychological suspense, because this is a gem. But the real mystery is why the USA is so late to publish it. (I'm not complaining, being in Australia to get it early, though.)