This is a beautifully crafted, evocative and alive debut novel. We see Anne fleetingly as a misplaced adult at the opening of the book, the village outsider. But this is the story of a child who doesn’t even fit into her relatively mis-fit family, who seeks solace in the wood near where she lives. Leaving home aged 14 with nothing but a wheelbarrow of miscellaneous tools and objects liberated from her father’s shed, Anne takes up residence under a Pollard Ash tree in the depths of the wood. She learns how to survive within the wood, she learns how to prosper and to grow.

(As reviewed on my blog, March 2010)

Foraging one day Anne meets Steve who lives with his aging mother and runs the local dump, and with whom she strikes up a friendship of support. Steve teaches her some of the survival techniques he has learned in the armed forces. In return for food and companionship, Anne works at reinvigorating some of the detritus that ends up at the dump, and with her care and attention Steve can sell it on to earn a living. It gives her a purpose and a connection, however tenuous, to the world outside the wood.

Gradually, in the wood, she is no longer an outsider to herself. She fits, she has a place in this fertile and living place. And Beatty makes us hear and breath and smell the wood. Only when the world outside encroaches within her world does Anne become insecure again.

Anne and the wood are sculpted with great warmth. As are some of the friendships she makes. I did feel however that the ending needed something else. We needed to be more fully led back to the life of Anne in adulthood, as this was not fully drawn at the outset, and I did feel I’d been left hanging a little at the close of the novel. ( )