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.