Set in the mid-1990s, this novel felt both of its time period and timely for today: then, the early popularilty of the Internet, and today's similar feeling around AI. Jane grew up in an isolated, off-the-grid cabin in Montana with her father. She knows little of the outside world, just that her mother died in a car crash and they used to live in the California Bay Area. But as she gets older she wants to know more, and she starts to question her dad's teachings and ever-more-disturbing actions. Technology vs. nature; isolation vs. society; innocence vs. knowledge — this book is suspenseful, poignant, and a great read.

I usually enjoy Reese's Book Club picks and The House in the Pines was an enjoyable book although not what I expected. The book is written in third person with the main protagonist being a young 25-year-old named, Maya. When she was eighteen, Maya dated a man named Frank and she seemed to lose significant periods of time when with him. A key event is when Maya's best friend, Aubrey, just died for no reason when having a conversation with Frank. Fast forward to 7 years later when Maya was 25 and saw a video on social media where the same Frank is in a booth at a diner in Maya's hometown of Pittsfield, MA, and the woman across from him also suddenly dies while just talking to Frank. While depicted as a thriller, the book is just about Frank's interesting ability (no spoiler alert). My favorite parts of the book dealt with Maya's Guatemalan background, her late father, and her visits to Guatemala City.

Interesting back and forth with the different time periods. I would look for this author's other offerings.

I have mixed impressions of and feelings about this novel. I found the plot intriguing, and enjoyed Serafina's narrative voice in her alternating chapters, as compared to Sara's, which disappointingly tended to fall more often into cliché turns of phrase. I understand the need to set the characters' "voices" apart and distinguish the eras in which they are living, but wonder if this could have been done with a bit more finesse for Sara's chapters. Some plot revelations were telegraphed and therefore more predictable, while others felt more satisfyingly surprising. At times, the events and interactions themselves seemed to draw on stereotypes, though I appreciate that the author appears to have researched the book quite thoroughly. There were also some unexpectedly graphic passages in the book, so readers who are especially sensitive to intimate and/or violent imagery may wish to be aware of this before reading. Overall, though it would be missing a meaningful modern dimension, I think I might have preferred this as a purely historical fiction novel, set entirely in Serafina's time period. All that said, I would still be interested to read other novels by this same author, in the hopes that they are more of the quality of Serafina's chapters than Sara's.

I think that I was way too excited to read this and that my expectations were too high. I liked the choose your own concept but I didn’t like Marsh at all.

This book had me in tears by the end of it. It was almost like I could feel the pain of the characters seeping through the pages. By far one of the best books I have ever read.

You will love this book if you like The Red Queen series and the Hunger Games. It is a great enemies to lovers novel, a wonderful adventure and a very addicting book.

Already left a review for this week when I posted my previous time. I still feel the same about the book-good read but not one of my favorite books by this author.

I read this all by myself

It was a really good volume but I didn’t like how Nagato, Konan, and Tamiko just immediately thought morays was great, like he was an enemy shinobi, why do you just immediately think he’s great