REVIEW: "The Boy From The Woods" by Harlan Coben
I will never take an ancestory.com DNA test.
I'm relatively firm in this resolution
Having never known my father, I worry that, were I to indulge what little curiosity I may have, and spit into a tube to discover where my ancestors originated, I might accidentally meet a relative.
And, though it wouldn't be the end of the world as I know it, I also don't have a desire to connect with anyone on my father's side.
Because he obviously doesn't have a desire to connect with me.
Which is fine.
I'm not all Amanda-Bynes-in-What-A-Girl-Wants about this.
I don't feel like I'm missing out.
I don’t feel like I’m incomplete.
It. Seriously. Is. Fine.
Some things are just meant to be a certain way.
I mean, yes, I'm still salty that that bitch on “My Two Dads” selfishly had two fathers while I had none, but it does not impact my daily life.
This might be easier for me to say than some, though. Because, really, the only hole in my history is the dead half of my family tree, wilted and withered and without form.
For Wilde, one of the key characters in this Harlan Coben’s The Boy From The Woods, the past is decidedly murkier.
Quite uncommonly, Wilde knows nothing about his early history. He knows only that he was found, alone, in the woods in 1986.
Officials could only guess at his age, placing him between six and eight years old. And Wilde himself could be of no help. Though he could speak and he was able to read, he knew neither how he acquired those skills nor how he came to live in the woods.
All he knew was that, as long as he could remember, he had been scavenging off the land and breaking into homes, providing for himself in a way that no young child should have to.
Fortunately, Wilde had a friend to help him transition into living in structured society. A boy he had met and played with in the woods prior to his discovery, named David.
David’s mother, Hester, a powerful though not yet prominent attorney, was understandably reluctant to believe her son’s tales of his friend in the woods. So she was as surprised as anyone when the boy her son had spoken of materialized and the mystery of his origins came to light.
Though it has been 30+ years since Wilde was found, the bond he built with David never weakened. So when David died in a tragic car accident, leaving behind a widow and a son, Matthew, Wilde understandably felt honor-bound to watch over them.
For Matthew, the difficulty of growing up fatherless has been tempered by the presence of both Wilde, a surrogate father, and Hester, a brash grandmother who tells it like it is everywhere — including on her cable news TV show Crimstein on Crime.
So when a classmate, Naomi, goes missing, Matthew knows immediately to whom he should turn. And when he shows up in his grandmother’s TV studio, she can tell something is seriously wrong.
Knowing that it must be important if Matthew is coming to her for help, she enlists the assistance of the eponymous Boy From The Woods, Wilde. Though much has changed in the three decades since he was plucked from the woods, Wilde remains an incredibly intuitive, uniquely skilled individual who can see clearly what others cannot.
But as Hester and Wilde work in tandem to find out what happened to Naomi, they discover that nothing is as it seems. Yet they persist, despite the powerful forces working against them and the inherent danger associated with continuing to ask questions that someone doesn’t want you to have the answers to.
As I have come to expect from Coben, who is as reliable as he is prolific, the definitive strength of this novel was the narration.
Though all distinctive in their own right, each of Coben’s characters had a rich, real, often hilarious voice. This worked well to counterbalance the tension fundamentally present in a thriller novel.
Particularly engaging was Hester, the ballsy, brash, blissfully unapologetic matriarch and all-around powerhouse.
Though this character had a clear depth, she also served as a constant source of perfectly timed, superbly worded one-liners. And it was because of these barbs and her overall I’m-too-old-to-give-a-fuck attitude that this character sparkled.
But it wasn’t just the characters that made this novel special, the plot was just as memorable.
At the start, it seemed like this would be a simple tale about a missing teen. It quickly became clear, however, that the true mystery was much more complex and the implications significantly further reaching.
Reflecting social and political conflict that we see playing out across cable news and splashed on the homepage of sites all over the internet, Coben took a ripped-from-the-headlines approach to crafting this novel.
And, for me at least — someone who is still trying to wrap her head around how this is possibly the world in which we are living in 2020 — it was tremendously cathartic.
Ever endeavoring to understand a world that evolves so rapidly it defies comprehension, I found this fictionalized version — which closely mirrored the conflicts we are seeing in social classes and government every day — to be almost...informative.
Sure, it wasn’t true, but it allowed me to pause time and think about things from a different perspective.
All factors considered, this Coben novel is a 2020 must-read — particularly for the distrustful and disillusioned.
Based on the conclusion of this novel, I can only assume that this is going to be the start of a new series. And I fervently hope that I am correct, as I am desperate to spend more time with Wilde and Hester and even Matthew in the future.
A twisty thriller that takes readers on a ride that is eerily reminiscent of the contemporary world in which we are living, this Coben novel is a cut above the rest.
It earns 5 out of 5 cocktails.
When it comes to prolific writers, Harlan Coben is definitely one of my favorites. Though he somehow manages to crank out book after book at breakneck pace, they all feel fresh and new and engaging. Which prolific author is your favorite and why? Tell me about this individual in the comments, below, so I can add him or her to my must-read list.
Let’s see what I’m going to pick up next. Subscribe to updates in the sidebar on the right and follow me on Goodreads.
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