Book Review: I'm going to stall a bit and talk first about how Deborah Kay Davies constructed Reasons She Goes to the Woods. Each chapter is a single page. Every chapter has the chapter title (usually one or two words) on one page and the single page chapter on the facing page, so every other page is almost blank. Hope that makes sense. So in effect, the book is only half as long as it looks. The chapters are sequential and chronological, but there may be days, weeks, months, maybe a year (?) between chapters (pages). The format was actually intriguing in and of itself. But enough stalling, to the story. The main character, the "she" in Reasons She Goes to the Woods, is Pearl, and at the start she is around six or so, and by the end of the book she seems well into adolescence. For Pearl, it's not easy being normal: she is a troubled and unpleasant child, who can't always control her actions. The reader gets some sense of why this is so, but perhaps not the whole story, leaving some mystery in the mix. At first one is not too sympathetic to Pearl, but as the story goes along it becomes apparent that she has serious issues and an obsession that controls her life, even to her own sadness and detriment. She does bad things, but can't always help it, and there may be reasons she is the way she is. She is both disturbed and disturbing. It was an enjoyable, quick, and intriguing read. I'm still trying to decide if Deborah Kay Davies gave us enough of the story, or if some necessary parts were omitted, and she needed to tell us more about the Reasons She Goes to the Woods. [3.5 Stars]
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