What Lies in the Woods

The novel depicts the violent attack in the woods as a pivotal event that both transitioned Naomi and her friends from children into adults and also permanently trapped them in the past. Significantly, the girls were 11 years old when the attack took place. On the precipice of puberty, the girls experienced new desires and tensions. When Naomi later recalls the summer of the attack, she reflects, “Things had been changing […] I remembered it as a period of stomach-turning dread” (179). Naomi also makes it clear that even before the attack, she and her friends did not conform to a stereotype of little girls being sweet and innocent: “They would have thought we were strange, wicked little beasts—and we were. What little girl isn’t” (26). The goddess game, the obsession with the skeleton, and the enactment of the ritual all gained additional force because of the intense period of transition in which they took place. In many cultures and at different points in history, young people undergo specific rites and rituals to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood and acknowledge the significance of this period in life; in the absence of these cultural markers, the three girls constructed their own.

The transition from childhood to maturity, especially for girls on the cusp of becoming women, is presented as a time of peril, which also explains why the girls attempt to cling to the freedom and safety they have as children. Oscar took a predatory interest in Naomi, even though he is much older, taunting her in ways that specifically pointed out her body’s adolescent changes: “Ooh, little Naomi’s a woman now. You bleeding yet?” (212). Oscar was interested in Naomi becoming sexually mature so that he could utilize her for his own pleasure; while his comment references menstruation, it also grimly foreshadows how Naomi will bleed when she is violently stabbed. The attack, in which all three girls became covered in blood, thus also becomes a menstruation analogy (often used as a marker of maturity). The scene also highlights the vulnerability of women’s bodies in a society where they are often the targets of violence. Jessi died because she was also largely objectified and devalued; while Oscar, Jim, and Cody were all sexually interested in her, none of them showed real care for her well-being. Naomi feels deep grief when she thinks about Jessi as “a girl, so much younger than [she] was now, who died in the forest and was lost” (134).

While the attack in the woods forced Naomi, Cass, and Liv to face the dangerous realities of the adult world, it also left them largely unable to move forward. Naomi, whose often panicked reliving of her stabbing shows elements of post-traumatic stress disorder—frequently thinks about how she has never really left the forest; a part of her is still there. Liv remains childlike and fragile because she can’t process the events of the attack and her role in them. To cope with the experience, Naomi engages in self-destructive behavior, particularly related to sexuality, because she has been left with a deeply ambivalent relationship to her body: “I didn’t know how to be whole. So any time I felt like I was healing, I found a way to break myself again” (184). Naomi is not fully integrated; she cannot move forward until the events of the attack are repeated. At the end of the novel, she is once again left bleeding and near death in the woods—a rewriting of the narrative that lets her find closure with the past. Afterward, she steps into a new phase of adulthood where she is capable of trust, independence, and pursuing genuine connection.