Another year, another 52 in 52 challenge! I’m starting this year off strong with Don’t Let the Forest In by C.G. Drews, a book that has been on my radar for quite a while and which I never got around to picking up until I saw a TikTok from the author illustrating the depth of the yearning going on between the two main characters. As a huge sucker for yearning, I was immediately sold, and now here we are.
I’m also trying a new rating system, which I also lifted from TikTok (and if I ever find the video again I’ll link the creator here). This rating system involves rating a book on five different topics (pleasure, purpose, prose, plot, and personal) and then taking the average of those five sub-ratings as the overall rating for the book. I’m not sure whether I’ll stick with this long-term, but at least for now it does seem like a good way to organize my thoughts on a book, so I’ll give it a try for at least a few books to see how it feels.
Pleasure: For my own enjoyment of the read, I gave this novel 4 out of 5 stars. I really enjoyed the book overall; it was a quick and compelling read, and in my opinion it didn’t have any segments that dragged. I liked the relationships between the characters and the way that the author creates certain holes or gaps in the narrative that are noticeable but not explained until the very end. Andrew’s anxiety and struggle with his own sexuality were also interesting to read.
Purpose: In terms of what this book set out to do and its efficacy at achieving that goal, I gave the book 3 out of 5 stars. It seems to me that this novel sets out to occupy a bit of a dark academia-slash-forest horror space and I do think that for the most part, it achieves that well! What kept it from being a higher rating for me is that, to me, the novel felt thin in terms of explaining the foundation of Andrew and Thomas’ abilities, for lack of a better term; despite being the basis for the main conflict and climax of the novel, we really don’t get much insight into how their abilities work or where they came from.
Prose: For the actual mechanics of the writing, I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars. The vibes here are absolutely crazy, y’all. Reading this book just feels like walking in a damp forest at night, like you can smell the dirt and rotting leaves and whatever weird wet animal smells are out there in the darkness. The words themselves are wet and mossy and green and dank, very tactile and evocative, and the language definitely draws on all the reader’s senses to build the world this novel inhabits.
Plot: For how good the actual story was, I gave 3 out of 5 stars. The story is very tightly constructed, but for me it was almost too tightly constructed. I would have liked to see more exploration of Andrew’s growing almost-friendships with Chloe and Lana; I would have liked more exploration of the hows and whys of the boys’ abilities, as I mentioned above. The entire story in this novel takes place in like two months, which means it has a lot of momentum, and I feel like there would have been more opportunity for deeper exploration and building that connection to the characters and the world if the plot had moved just a little bit more slowly.
Personal: The last rating is basically for that certain je ne sais quoi, ineffable quality that makes a book really good even when it isn’t really good. For this novel I rated a 4 out of 5. Even with the mild critiques I have above, overall I enjoyed this book. I found it a compelling read, I didn’t slog to get through any parts of it, I liked all the characters and the storyline, and the language used in the prose was weird and wonderful and kept my attention.
Overall rating: 4 stars (actually 3.6, but no book review site lets you do decimals to that level of precision, so I’m rounding up to the nearest 0.5 on all these reviews)