The Woman in the Woods

Leslie Pearse

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, September 19th 2017

The first thing I noticed when I opened The Woman in The Woods was the impressively long list of titles Lesley Pearse has to her name –a book a year for 25 years – and it is clear that she has found herself a successful formula, albeit one that is not to my tastes.

A quick Google search reveals her novels are often set in post-war Britain and centre on courageous girls/women facing adversity/danger/family secrets that stand in the way of happiness and love, and her latest offering is no exception. The story opens in 1960, when 15-year-old twins Duncan and Maisy Mitcham’s father sends his wife to a psychiatric hospital and his children to Nightingales, his mother’s country house near Burley.

Although angered by their father’s apparent eagerness to divest himself of all emotional encumbrances (and by their grandmother’s equally indifferent treatment of them), they soon grow close to Nightingales’ housekeeper and revel in the freedom the countryside affords. For the first time the twins also begin to develop separate interests; Maisy taking dancing lessons and making her first tentative steps towards romance while Duncan roams the woods and cultivates a friendship with Grace Deville, a reclusive woman whose refusal interact with her neighbours has earned her a reputation as a witch.

Then first Duncan and later Maisy are kidnapped by a predatory paedophile. When the police investigations founder, Grace takes it upon herself to rescue them and in so doing begins to reengage with society, while the twin’s father and grandmother realise they need to learn to acknowledge and express their feelings.

There is a lot of potential for suspense and psychological drama in this plot, but none of it is fully realised. The action is uneven and dramatic, events seem too implausible to allow the suspension of disbelief. Pearse also adopts a ‘tell don’t show’ approach, which means that Maisy’s voice remains the same at 18 as she did at 14.

As a result, I felt no real attachment to her and there was little sense that she has been substantially changed by events. My major disappointment, however, was that although the title (and the publicity) suggests that Grace’s story is at the heart of the book, her character is two dimensional and colourless, and her history, for most part, unexplored.

Easy to pick up and put down, The Woman in the Woods is a perfectly acceptable and inoffensive light read, but I would love to see what somebody like Joyce Carol Oates or Gillian Flynn would have done with it. Like certain famous fast-food franchises it is a novel that will appeal to a broad market, but one I found bland, unsatisfying and ultimately forgettable. 

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/fine-light-read-ultimately-unsatisfying