My Review:
Oh My goodness, this was rather a surprise, it covers some rather shocking and brutal subjects.
The book begins very beguilingly and gently, it starts almost like an Enid Blyton - "5 go down to the woods" featuring Maisy and Duncan, a very innocent pair of teenage twins going to stay with their grandmother who doesn't want them at her home, or even like them much. Their father is also a very remote and dour character and their Mother has recently been committed to a mental asylum!
It's just as well that this brother and sister are very close and don't really need anyone else, they are happy to spend a lot of their leisure time together, having picnics, exploring the countryside and New Forest on their bicycles, it could almost be idyllic and I was lulled into an era of innocence and naivety. They even begin to make friends with the family helper Janis becoming almost a surrogate Mum and getting to know the strange and reclusive inhabitants of the forest including Grace, the woman in the wood.
But suddenly everything turns sour when Duncan suddenly disappears. Despite a police search the family aren't too concerned, only Maisy knows her twin so well she knows he wouldn't run away without telling her and she cannot give up her search for him.
It's just as well for what has happened to Duncan is no Babes in the wood fairy tale, its something out of a nightmare. The story is part mystery, part psychological drama.
Something terrible really has happened and it is up to Maisy to try and find out what.
There are some very dark and nasty things which are described mainly quite sparsely, leaving a lot to the imagination and without too much sensationalism or graphic detail. But one brief description of what happened to one young boy, quite literally gave me nightmares.
A very readable yet scary look at madness, survival, abduction and abuse, wrapped in a candy coating which doesn't take away the very unpleasant taste of things you don't want to think about.
The Blurb
Fifteen-year-old twins Maisy and Duncan Mitcham have always had each other. Until the fateful day in the wood . . .
One night in 1960, the twins awake to find their father pulling their screaming mother from the house. She is to be committed to an asylum. It is, so their father insists, for her own good.
It's not long before they, too, are removed from their London home and sent to Nightingales - a large house deep in the New Forest countryside - to be watched over by their cold-hearted grandmother, Mrs Mitcham. Though they feel abandoned and unloved, at least here they have something they never had before - freedom.
The twins are left to their own devices, to explore, find new friends and first romances. That is until the day that Duncan doesn't come back for dinner. Nor does he return the next day. Or the one after that.
When the bodies of other young boys are discovered in the surrounding area the police appear to give up hope of finding Duncan alive. With Mrs Mitcham showing little interest in her grandson's disappearance, it is up to Maisy to discover the truth. And she knows just where to start. The woman who lives alone in the wood about whom so many rumours abound. A woman named Grace Deville.
The Woman in the Wood is a powerful, passionate and sinister tale of a young woman's courage, friendship and determination.
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