Pine book review

Pine by Francine Toon
Published by Doubleday on January 23, 2020
Pages: 336
Goodreads

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 spare, haunting prose, Francine Toon creates an unshakeable atmosphere of desolation and dread. In a place that feels like the end of the world, she unites the gloom of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times.

I will be completely honest and say that I picked up Pine because it was on sale for Kindle and the cover drew me. I had no idea what it was about going in and I didn’t really do anything to change that, and I think I would have realised that it wasn’t going to be my kind of book and saved myself the 99p. This book is really atmospheric and that was something that hit me all the way through, and it was probably one of the best bits of the book, however I found the story and the plot lacking and I wished there had been more of a run up to the ending and the “shock” twist.

The characters in Pine are hard to describe because on the one hand you have this really small village kind of vibe where everyone knows each other and on the other you have this weird disconnect with everyone. It almost felt as though this story had started in the middle of everything else and there wasn’t any context or thought for how the reader would feel being dropped into this. I also feel like there were lots of half stories, so one character and I’m thinking about the main two, Niall and Lauren and the grief they were going through. Nothing is explained and nothing is resolved and it almost feels as though it should have been but it just didn’t happen. It was a little frustrating to say the least.

I also found that the other characters were lax in their development and by the end of the book I still had no idea who any one was or why they were acting the way they did. It was so frustrating to meet all of these different people but still know only the bare minimum about them by the time we got to the end of the book. I wish I could say that I loved all the characters in Pine but to be honest I’m struggling to remember who they were and what their purpose was.

The best bit for me was definitely the setting, I really loved how atmospheric it was and it really kept me drawn into the story which counteracted the boredom I was facing when it came down to the characters and the actual plotline. I loved hearing about the woods and the loop that the kids cycled on, all of it was really reminiscent of a childhood spent roaming around trying to find things to do. It really was the one redeeming factor when it came to Pine.

For me the worst bit was always going to be the ending and how unresolved everything seemed to be. I always appreciate a good twist ending but this to me came out of the blue and not in a good way. I don’t believe that there was any reason for the book to end the way it did apart from shock value and it is never discussed in the story. I just wished that the ending had been better and I would have understood what had happened.

I don’t think I would recommend Pine, it wasn’t creepy or had any sort of thriller aspects to it. The one thing that did redeem it was the atmospheric parts of the description, but overall I was just a little disappointed with the story itself and the plot line.

Have you read this one? Did you get suckered in by the cover? Let me know!