Review: Francine Toon’s Pine is a haunting and heartbreakingly bewitching tale

Francine Toon's debut novel Pine is a haunting and heartbreakingly bewitching tale.

10-year-old Lauren and her father, Niall, are heading out to take her trick-or-treating - or guising, as she calls it - when the young girl notices a woman standing on the side of the road. Thinking nothing more of it, especially since her father doesn't seem to have seen the woman, Lauren goes trick-or-treating with her friend Billy - the pair of them dressed in makeshift costumes, going house-from-house to perform party ticks for their neighbours in Strath Horne. En route home, the woman appears once again: this time, stepping in front of Niall and Lauren's car - and brings complete upheaval to their lives. While she's gone from their home by morning, the woman keeps appearing around the village. Sometimes, its simply a glimpse out of the corner of someone's eye - other times, she has more extended interactions with the villagers. No matter the kind of interaction, though, she slips from their minds as soon as she's out of sight. Around 10 years before the events of the story, Lauren's mum Christine vanished without a trace. Niall and Lauren are still struggling to come to terms with her being gone and, really, it doesn't help aha the villagers are constantly gossiping about her disappearance - and Niall's possible involvement in it. It's a little more than halfway through the book, the storyline takes a dark and chilling turn. Sinister-seeming circles are burnt near a neighbours house, and Lauren and Diane discover an eerie ramshackle cabin the forest. Which, in the history of books (and film - and TV shows, too), has never, ever, ever, ever contained anything good or helpful or remotely happy - so you can only imagine how well things pan out in there for Lauren and Diane. And when Ann Marie, an older friend of Lauren's, disappears and Niall begins to suffer alcoholic-induced blackouts, it soon becomes clear to Lauren that she can no longer know who to trust. The setting is equal parts stunning and claustrophobic, and it's hard to feel like you're not in the village yourself - or, at the very least, like you may have been there at some point before. Packed with folklore, magic and an eerie sense of foreboding every time you turn the page, Pine will captivate readers from the very first page.