2020/038: Pine -- Francine Toon

She’s visiting to say there’s trouble afoot. Most don’t remember seeing her though, do they? Most don’t want to, that’s the thing. It’s a kind of shock that passes over and they push her away out of their heads. [loc. 1932]

Lauren is ten years old and lives with her father Niall in a house at the edge of the pine forest. Her mother went away when she was very small, and Niall won't say much about her. Lauren isn't popular at school, and her only real friends are Billy, who lives nearby and makes dens with her in the woods, and Diane and Ann-Marie, who are both older and who occasionally baby-sit.

Coming home from Halloween guising, Niall and Lauren see a woman in the road, wearing only a dirty white dressing-gown. They take her back with them, but the next morning she's vanished, and Niall doesn't seem to remember her. Lauren's sure of what she saw, just as she is in the woods when she and Billy see a woman in white -- whom Billy immediately forgets about. But Lauren can't forget.

This novel felt imbalanced. I enjoyed the slow build of atmosphere in the first two-thirds of the book, and the depiction of small-town life in rural Scotland. (I grew up somewhere like that, with the nearest supermarket miles away, and a gaggle of unfriendly schoolmates, an hour-long bus ride to school and wild land within five minutes of home.) But the last third of the book, where a lot happens very quickly, seemed to lose its way a bit: the story became at once more threatening and more mundane, though the strong supernatural element remains throughout. I also felt the prose was less precise, more rushed, in those last chapters. ('Tentatively', for example, seems a very mild word to use for the progression of two young girls in a dark deserted house, at night, with a definite sense of presence and a perfect circle of broken crockery manifesting around them ...)

Lauren is an entirely credible pre-teen girl, old beyond her years in some ways -- she's isolated from her peers, and has lived alone with her father for years -- and childish in others. She is also in possession of a 'Spaewife's Beuk' that was once her mother's, and which has given her a solid grounding in the occult. I wish I had thought of casting spells on the bullies at school: but my spells might not have worked. I also liked Lauren's older friends, Diane and Ann-Marie: both have secrets and are probably not the kind of girl that Lauren should be hanging out with, but they, and Billy, show loyalty and affection towards her.

The final third of the book didn't live up to the promise of the earlier parts, but overall Pine left a positive impression: I'll be looking out for more of Francine Toon's work.