Back in December, my sister was in a production of A Christmas Carol. She lives about three hours away, so my mom and I drove up together every weekend to catch as many showings as we can. We often listen to audiobooks together, but between the road trip weekends and the insanity that is Christmas season in retail I’d been exhausted. On at least one of the trips, I slept while she drove and listened to her next book club book, which was These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant. I drifted in and out of sleep, so I heard a few scenes wildly out of context (including, unfortunately, the epilogue). What I heard sounded interesting and my mom enjoyed the book so later, on my own time and fully awake, I listened to it for myself.
What’s it about?
Cooper and his young daughter Finch are living off the land in a cabin deep in the woods. Those aren’t their real names, and they’re as much hiding as living in the middle of nowhere; years ago, Cooper did something bad enough that he had to flee with Finch and change their names lest his past come back to bite him and take Finch away from him. After several years of relative peace—occasional visits from their odd and unsettling neighbor Scotland notwithstanding—things start to go wrong, throwing new people into their small world and threatening the closed but safe life Cooper built for them.
How’s the narration?
These Silent Woods has two narrators. Bronson Pinchot, reading as Cooper, does the vast majority of the novel, with Stephanie Willis taking the sole chapter that is not from Cooper’s first person perspective. Both narrators do a good job: engaging but calm, just what the story needs. This novel is sort of a thriller, but it’s mostly about the careful atmosphere that Cooper creates, and Pinchot creates that with his voice.
What’d I think?
I have slightly mixed feelings about These Silent Woods, and it’s all due to the end. There’s the slightest disconnect between the setup and the payoff, and even though I could kind of see the end coming I still found it a little underwhelming.
The start and setup are fantastic. After finishing, I read some Goodreads reviews and found that it is a bit divisive from the start. Most readers love the slow, atmospheric setup. Others take offense that the novel is categorized as a thriller instead of as a family drama or even as religious fiction (we’ll get to that in a minute). At least as regards the beginning, I’m in the first camp. We don’t know what exactly the threat to Cooper and Finch is, or even if there is one. We don’t know what bad thing Cooper did, and the cagey way he speaks about his past makes it very hard to trust him. It’s very possible that we should be rooting for Cooper to keep Finch safe from whoever might come to take her from him, but it’s equally possible that Cooper is a dangerous lunatic and his daughter should be liberated from him immediately. It’s even harder to tell who’s good and who’s bad when Cooper and Finch’s weird neighbor Scotland shows up with bloodied hands, an assault rifle, and newspaper clippings that prove that he knows exactly who Cooper is and what he did.
While there’s tension in the present day—will Cooper keep himself and Finch hidden? What does Scotland want with them? What happened to Jake, the friend who normally brings them supplies for the winter but who didn’t show?—the most propulsive mystery is in the past: what exactly did Cooper do? We know he has PTSD from something awful that happened in Afghanistan, and we know that he did something bad in order to keep Finch with him, and each time we flash back we learn a bit more about the time before the woods. I’m a fan of unreliable narrators, and I loved how little I trusted Cooper. The sheer number of dark predictions I made about his past and what he was lying about—he’d killed Finch’s mother Cindy; that he wasn’t actually Finch’s father; that he and Cindy were never actually in a relationship; that he’d kidnapped Finch; etc.—delighted me. Adding Scotland to the mix made it even better. One of these two men, I told myself, is a dangerous monster and the other is, at heart, basically good. The question was figuring out which was which. Is Cooper a loving father or a murderer who has forcibly wrenched a young girl from society? Is Scotland a quirky but helpful neighbor or a blackmailer with a disturbed fixation on the heroes?
The pacing is admittedly slow, but I like a slow pace when it adds to the characterization and atmosphere, as it does here. I love the way Grant peeled the layers back one by one while introducing new elements into the present-day storyline.
There’s a little bit of a dip in the middle when a love interest for Cooper makes an appearance. It’s a little instalovey for my taste. I get it from Cooper’s POV: he hasn’t seen a woman in years and his social circle for the past decade has consisted of 1) a child 2) a potential creeper he neither trusts nor likes 3) an old buddy he sees once a year. From hers, though? Imagine meeting a paranoid mountain man with severe PTSD who hasn’t looked in a mirror in years, needs someone to fetch him several months’ worth of groceries because he can’t go into town for himself, refuses to explain why he has to hide from law enforcement, and comes with a precocious child and going “Not only am I not afraid to spend the night in this man’s remote, cell-coverage-free cabin, but I’m actually falling for him.” Couldn’t be me.
The disappearance of a local girl is a more promising development. Here it comes, I thought. Finally we’re going to figure out who’s the keeper and who’s the creeper.
I was deeply into the book, and then I was disappointed by the ending. To be fair, part of this reaction may be due to the fact that I heard what is arguably the most important scene when I faded in from my nap. Before I started the novel for myself form the start, I heard the scene when Cooper admits exactly what happened the day he took Finch. Because the things I was imagining were much, much darker I had convinced myself that this scene was not the final reveal and that there would be at least one more that was worse. I’m not usually the person reading a book and pumping my fist for more violence, more brutality, but I think These Silent Woods needed it. After the buildup, both what was on the page and what I’d created mentally, the reality was a disappointment. Possibly it’s because it wasn’t a surprise like it was supposed to be. Possibly because, in the realm of thrillers, it’s a very, very tame scene. In any case, I think the setup promised more than what was delivered as pertains to Cooper’s past.
It’s the ultimate ending to the book that took that final star from These Silent Woods. I really liked it up until the last bit, and taking it down to three stars felt too steep since I’ve been rating books three stars lately that I enjoyed far less than this one, but it’s definitely a strange ending that didn’t quite hit the target for me. Here come the spoilers.
Click here to skip to the verdict.
In reading this, as I’ve said, I was convinced that we’d eventually figure out that between Cooper and Scotland one was good and the other bad. When a teenager disappears locally and the police seem to think that it’s a result of foul play, I was certain that we’d finally gotten to it. With the questions of Cooper’s past wrapped up conclusively as bad PTSD, poor instinct control, but mostly well-meaning it seemed that the end was going to be a reckoning with Scotland. The guy showed up with bloody fingers and an AK. He has flesh-eating insects that he uses to clean skulls he finds in the woods. He spies on Cooper and Finch practically nonstop, and has a deeply unsettling habit of touching Finch when they meet. When they first meet he caresses her face in a way that is either paternal or predatory. The guy is a few spoons short of a set. With the addition of another vulnerable young girl, if an older girl than Finch, I was pretty sure that my warning bells had been set off with good reason. Scotland did something to the missing girl, and Cooper was going to have to either let it happen or risk his and Finch’s safety to save this stranger.
There was only one thing that nagged me about this theory. For some reason that I can’t remember now, I read an interview with Cunningham Grant. In it, she comes across as extremely religious (if you don’t want to click the link: the interviewer asks her about non-writing passions and she replies “I’m a Christian.”). With that in the back of my mind, it was hard for me to fully expect that Scotland—who occasionally sings hymns and quotes the Bible—was going to be the villain of the piece, particularly in opposition to Cooper, who occasionally mentions that he does’t fully believe in God or Heaven and Hell. If I didn’t know that Cunningham Grant was religious, Scotland’s characterization could have gone either direction. His religious undertones could be intended as unsettling, particularly when combined with his strange touchiness with Finch. He could be the sort of religious person who uses their religion to excuse their worst actions. He could be a sort of commentary on pedophilia in the church. Or—with his all-knowing ways, unexpected and undetectable entrances, bloodied hands, and insistence that he’s there to help as soon as he’s called—he could be a sort of Jesus figure. Having read that interview, the second option seemed more likely.
And that’s accurate. Scotland had nothing to do with that girl’s disappearance—she’d had an abusive boyfriend we only hear about a few pages before her body is discovered, a boyfriend who, unless I’m misremembering, never even gets a name—and in fact he’s the hero of the novel. Any weirdness is quickly written off. Like Cooper, he lost his partner in a car crash involving a deer. Unlike Cooper, he also lost his child. He slightly lost his mind after that, but before that he was both a priest and a taxidermist. Everything is explained! To keep Cooper from going to the police to explain what happened to the girl—there was a photograph and he’d become a person of interest—Scotland goes instead. He claims to have caught Cooper and Finch trespassing on his property and killed them, providing evidence he lifted from Cooper’s cabin. By so doing, he sacrifices himself to give Cooper and Finch a new lease on life. To hit the message even harder, he quotes the famous verse from John: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Ultimately, the thesis of the novel is grace. Cooper may have done bad things in his past, but Scotland has offered him this gift of grace, and all he can do is accept it and move forward.
Is it a nice ending? Sure. Is it unrealistically neat and tidy? Absolutely. Finch reenters society with no ill-effects from having lived alone in the woods with her paranoid survivalist father for the first seventeen years of her life. She even gets a relationship with her grandparents. Cooper gets to marry Marie and live happily ever after in the cabin. It’s just too nice and neat for my taste. With that incredible and ominous setup, it feels like a cheat that everyone in the book is basically good (except for that one boyfriend who murders his girlfriend all but off camera). They all get a bright and uncomplicatedly happy ending. No one ever worries much about Finch’s mental health. Finch, aside from her lack of socialization and education, stumbled across a corpse (and not just any corpse, a murdered corpse of a teenager). No one spares a thought to the fact that, whether the boyfriend got caught or not, a young girl died and she might not have if Cooper or Finch had spoken up about having seen her or if the otherwise all-seeing Scotland had stepped in. Cooper is actually a decent guy. Scotland is actually a christlike good guy. Grace saves the day. Happy endings for all.
It’s just a lot to swallow. I expected something darker and/or more realistic and those artificially sanded off endings simply ring false to me. Not to mention the overtly religious tone of the end of the book. There are a few religious references earlier in the book (my mom pointed out that there’s a Bible verse alongside a Whitman quote for the epithets), but it’s a hard turn into religion. I don’t mind a little bit of religion or spirituality in a book, and obviously it would be impossible for a writer to produce a book that doesn’t reflect their values in one way or another, but when it is this blatant it feels a little uncomfortable. I’m not alone in thinking that perhaps These Silent Woods should be categorized as Christian fiction. It’s not so much a book with Christian values or allegories so much as a book that ends with a Christianity Is Great! exclamation point.
What’d I think?
For the most part, These Silent Woods is great. The slow unfolding of old secrets alongside a present-day story that is at once a survival story, a heartwarming depiction of devoted fatherhood, and a mystery makes for a very compelling read. I was entranced… and then I wasn’t. The ending of the novel is a little too neat and tidy and has too-overt religious messaging to keep my undiluted enthusiasm. If slightly-too-happy endings and religion don’t turn you off, this is an engaging and intriguing read that mixes thriller with family drama and moves briskly. The ending wasn’t my favorite, but I liked the rest of the book enough to still recommend it with some level of enthusiasm.
What’s next?
Want another book that is both a thriller and a family story that keeps you asking “What exactly is going on?” Try Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam.
Like reading books when you’re certain some of the characters are victims and others are villains but you’re not sure who is who? Read And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (if you haven’t already).
We Are All the Same in the Dark by Julia Heaberlin gave me the same overall impression as These Silent Woods: great setup, slightly disappointing ending. If you’re more into the vibes than the conclusion, you might like it.
If you enjoyed the idea of a story about a beloved family member with a potentially dark secret, read The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty. It’s about a woman who finds a letter from her husband that he wants her to read only after his death.
Want a wilderness/setting-based mystery? Read Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.
Prefer mysteries about what happened in the past to what’s happening now? Try We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson, or Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson.
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