First i wanna say Thank you netgally so much for sending me this ebook to Review
Ok I really didn't like this book as a person who has dealt with mental issues I feel the author did a  bad representation of using Mental illness as a plot device I Realize Mental illness is in a lot of books Either to add to the character story for  the plot or to add to awareness But I feel the only reason The main character had mental illness with to add to the Thriller/mystery aspect and nothing else Making it something to be Feared. I also feel the book Didn't know if it was a romance book or mystery/thriller They didn't mix well with each other 

I wanna say thank you again to netgalley and to the author for sending me this review copy I'm sorry that i didn't like it this was one of my most anticipated books

What a twisty, turning tale! I was captivated from the very beginning. There were parts that were very difficult to read. Yet the characters were written in such a way that I couldn't quit thinking about them, even while I wasn't reading. The villain was not expected until very close to the end. I was convinced of the same ending as the main character. 

**There are definitely some triggers within this book that some would want to know before reading: mental illness, drug use, and detailed hunting scenes. Although, with this being categorized as a YA Thriller some vivid writing is a must. 

Thank you to the publisher through Netgalley for an advanced copy.

I was in the middle of a decent book when I decided to preview this title.  The other book was immediately put aside. Magda is a flawed and compelling character struggling with a serious mental  illness which makes her an unreliable narrator and contributes to the complexity of her character.  Her struggles  make her sympathetic in spite of her past questionable decisions. She does not just stumble into a mystery that she feels she must solve, but is thrust into the action and intrigue in an unavoidable series of events. You never think "Really! What is she doing?" There is an admirable suspension of disbelief created by the author. This book is worth your time.

I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I started this book! The description is a little vague, but there are lots of very serious topics talked about in this book (mental illness, addiction, murder, suicide, just to name a few) so there’s a lot of material that could be a potential trigger for a lot of people. Overall, a very good storyline. The story was paced well and I really did enjoy getting to know the characters. The suspense reads well. I truly was surprised at the end because you are kept off balance for a good bit and it’s easy to head down the wrong rabbit trail. Good read!

Magda can't remember the details of most of the last year. After a scandal that destroys her friends' group and leaves her in an institution, Magda isn't sure she wants to remember the details anyway. All she knows is that she's recorded everything in her journal. And she will never write in it again.

But after she meets a strange, charming boy in the woods at her grandparents' summer house, Magda starts to feel again. And that's dangerous. Because people are ending up dead. Just like last time…

--

Angelini has written a well-crafted YA thriller. There's drama, privileged rich kids you really can't feel sorry for, secrets, and a vibrant world inside the dense woods that makes it easy to see how someone could confuse what happens in the woods and out of them as two different worlds.

I was a bit torn on a rating for this one, because it's a good book, the past and present narration helps keep the pace from slowing down, and I was interested in what was happening from beginning to end. Unfortunately, there are two sticking points for me that I found a bit troubling.

Being mentally ill (or having a diagnosis or being on meds) does not make you an automatic villain or criminal suspect. People can be bad, manipulative people without needing to justify that with an illness. Throughout the book mental illness was not handled with nuance to bring awareness. It was a plot point. Various elements of selective mutism, PTSD, and schizophrenia (which sometimes seemed like it was confused with dissociative identity disorder) were used to add twists to the plots and move the story along, but weren't presented in their complex reality.

This was also true with narcotics addictions. Addiction is another linchpin of this plot, but the characters with addictions are also not given the nuanced treatment of real humans struggling through addiction and recovery and relapse. In fact, they bordered on stereotypical.

In the end, I’m not sure that this one was for me.

What She Found in the Woods tells the story of Magda, a teenager who has been sent from New York to the Pacific Northwest to live with her grandparents for the summer. She’s uninspired and bored until she meets Bo and life gets even more interesting when she realises that not all is as it seems in the woods near his forest home.

It’s been a while since I’ve read a young adult novel and so I was nervous that I would find it hard to get into but I actually got through the book quite quickly. The story really gets going once you’re introduced to Bo and get to follow along as this young couple’s relationship starts to develop. I thought Angelini captured quite well the awkwardness of being a teenager and trying to fit in with the crowd.

Where the book lost me though was how the author treated the topic of mental health. I found the depiction of medical professionals troubling, as I did the portrayal of women living with addiction . It’s quite negative and I didn’t understand the need for that. I also found it weirdly dark and overly complicated towards the latter part of the book. There’s nothing wrong with darker content but I felt that it was unnecessary and the plot became almost unrealistic by the end (even though it’s fiction to begin with).

I think this had the potential to be a Veronica Mars – esque mystery but it got lost along the way. A good first part but one that could have done with some editing touches to the second and third.

I'm not going to lie, I did not have high hopes for this book. The first bit of it felt like I had been tricked into a non-thriller book. However, as things moved along, I couldn't put the book down as I needed to know what was going to happen. As it started to become more of a thriller book, I was more and more interested. The twists in this book are well done and incredibly redeeming. Admittedly, I didn't and still don't care about any of the characters. I reacted to any deaths with indifference. As is generally the case in thrillers, there isn't much character growth either.

I could get into the issues around the way missing people, drug usage (both legal and illegal), and the handling of these things- but really, it's a thriller novel. This is considered normal. The "not crazy, maybe crazy" trope is not new, but, to see it in a teen was interesting. 

3.5 out of 5 stars overall.

Read full review: 9/23/2020

I was provided an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Astonishingly terrible. The author’s writing was painfully basic to the point where I thought this was a new YA author (spoiler alert: she’s not) and the plot kept layering tropes that were not only moronic but potentially dangerous like encouraging pathological lying while vilifying mental illness, sexuality, and conventional medicine. It got boring rather quickly with the amount of unhealthy relationships and unbelievable plot lines in this book. Subpar “thriller” if you can even call it a thriller.

My student loves your books so much you did such an amazing job writing this. Thank you so much for helping my students and i during this pandemic!

Let me preface this review by making it clear that in this novel Josephine Angelini uses schizophrenia as the plot device of a thriller. Pause to let that sink in...

Using mental illness to add mystery and depth to your plot, especially in a thriller/horror/suspense novel, is not only uninspired, it also misrepresents those people who actually have these conditions, and it misinforms those who don't know the facts about these conditions, which allows misconceptions and fear to breed. Schizophrenics aren't untrustworthy psycho-killers. I'm really disappointed that in 2020 a book targeted at a younger audience is portraying this trope.

Still following this thread: using a schizophrenic as your unreliable narrator is the ultimate form of lazy writing. "This person can't even keep track of what's real and what they're making up. This'll really mess with the reader!" Here's an idea: take a creative writing class. There is no need to rely on tropes and to misrepresent/libel against an entire demographic to write a wild and unexpected thriller. Just look at Gone Girl.

Ranting aside, the writing itself is good. The structure is good, the pacing is good (though maybe a little slow at times). I can't deny that What She Found in the Woods is a technically sound novel. It's just that I despise the plot. If I had been told from the blurb that this thriller/suspense novel's main character has schizophrenia it would have been a hard pass for me.

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.

This is ya thriller which has an ending that packs a punch. I did find the beginning a little slow and it didn't really feel like a thriller, hence the four stars.

The book does cover some very sensitive issues, but I think it does it well. It follows Magda/Lena who has an unknown, troubled past at the beginning. She moves to her Grandparents house for the Summer to help her recover. On walks in the woods she finds a mysterious boy who she finally feels like she has a connection with. At the same time the town she is staying in is facing a growing drug problem which many of her friends get drawn into.

Overall, it's an interesting take on the ya thriller genre and I'd recommend to those who enjoy thrillers.

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.