Pine by Francine Toon

 

From Goodreads

'It's both eerie and thrilling at once, and had me under its spell until the end.' Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

They are driving home from the search party when they see her. The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men.

Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she’s gone.

In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago.

Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father’s turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.

In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophobia. In a place that can feel like the edge of the word, she unites the chill of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times.

'Hugely atmospheric, exquisitely written and utterly gripping.' Lucy Foley, author of The Hunting Party

My thoughts

I grabbed a copy of this via Borrowbox the digital borrowing side of my local Library. 

This is a hard story to review as it's many things all at the same time. This story is dark, atmospheric and claustrophobic at times, set among a small wooded forest the village in which Niall and his daughter Lauren live is in the Highlands of Scotland. It's the perfect book to read on a dark night with the curtains drawn and a log fire blazing in the hearth.

I gave it a 3 stars or 6/10.

I quite enjoyed the story for the most part and had my suspicions as to what was happening for the most part, at times it was a little confusing though as aspects of it appeared to merge into one another.

Having finished the story I am still none the wiser really as to what happened or who did what to whom. I felt that the story promised so much, but in my opinion it failed to deliver to it's full potential. Maybe it was down to the naive innocence of Lauren the narrator.