Why a Booktrail?
2000s: 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.
Pine
What you need to know before your trail
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.
Locations
Reset- Scotland - Scottish Highlands
- A: Loch Lomonds national park
- B: Pitlochry - Pine Trees Pitlochry Hotel
- C: Cairngorns
Travel Guide
Discover the Pine forests of the Scottish Highlands
The novel opens and it’s Halloween night. Lauren and her father have been out “guising”, and are on their way home when they come across a strange, white-gowned woman standing in the middle of the road. She seems confused. Injured? So, they take her home with them, but the next day, she’s gone and what’s weirder still is that her father can’t even remember seeing the woman at all.
Francine Toon was raised in the Highlands and it shows for the atmosphere in the novel is gothic, creepy and down right scary. It’s not just the forest she describes but the essence of it – the trees and their shadows, the noises, the air, and oh those noises again.
The novel’s title refers both to Christine’s name for her daughter (Oren, the Gaelic word for “pine”) and to the forest which encloses the village.
The setting is one of a Grimm’s fairy tale. There is a sense of witchery, other worldly beings and a deep, increasing sense of unease.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Pine
Destination/location: Scottish Highlands Author/Guide: Francine Toon Departure Time: 2000s
Back to ResultsWhere Next?
