Review of The House in the Pines

One of my 2023 reading resolutions is to try more book club books (Reese, GMA and Jenna) especially when they pick thrillers. So I grabbed The House in the Pines and … hmmm…. uhhh … well. Want to know my thoughts? Check out my review of The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes.

Disclosure: as an Amazon Affiliate I may receive a small percentage of qualifying purchases.

The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes

Published on January 3, 2023 by Dutton

Maya was a high school senior when her best friend, Aubrey, mysteriously dropped dead in front of the enigmatic man named Frank whom they’d been spending time with all summer.

Seven years later, Maya lives in Boston with a loving boyfriend and is kicking the secret addiction that has allowed her to cope with what happened years ago, the gaps in her memories, and the lost time that she can’t account for.

But her past comes rushing back when she comes across a recent YouTube video in which a young woman suddenly keels over and dies in a diner while sitting across from none other than Frank. Plunged into the trauma that has defined her life, Maya heads to her Berkshires hometown to relive that fateful summer–the influence Frank once had on her and the obsessive jealousy that nearly destroyed her friendship with Aubrey.

At her mother’s house, she excavates fragments of her past and notices hidden messages in her deceased Guatemalan father’s book that didn’t stand out to her earlier. To save herself, she must understand a story written before she was born, but time keeps running out, and soon, all roads are leading back to Frank’s cabin.

What Else Has Ana Reyes Written?

The House in the Pines is her debut novel, a book that came out of her MFA thesis. You’ll see my thoughts about the book in the review below. I am a former English major who does love a literary book, but I don’t think that literary writing and thrillers are always a good combination. Though I did just enjoy this literary thriller; go figure! And I discuss below (and in my Spoiler Review of The House in the Pines) that I think the book is (incorrectly, I think) being marketed as a thriller might explain its low Goodreads rating.

Review of House in the Pines by Ana Reyes

In my recent round up of The Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2022, I found some gems that I’d previously overlooked, most of them in the GMA (Good Morning America) Bookclub. So in 2023 I am keeping an eye out for their selections, as well as those from Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager.

The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes is a January 2023 Reese’s Book Club pick.

Reese’s IG post (above) definitely describes The House in the Pines as a thriller, as do the book’s (many) blurbs on the back.

In the past, some mystery and thriller readers have been left a bit perplexed by some of Reese’s “thriller” picks. There was this popular book I liked, but it was NOT a thriller. And then there was this thriller pick with a confusing ending had SO many of my spoiler discussion participants pretty annoyed.

So I tried to keep all this in mind as I read.

My first take on The House in the Pines was maybe it was really a thriller because it tried to incorporate so many 2010s and 2020s thriller cliches

Cliches don’t mean a bad book! But The House in the Pines features some major thriller cliches of the 2010s and 2020s, from the substance abusing unreliable narrator reminiscent of books like The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window and The House Across the Lake to the character returning to her hometown after the traumatic murder of her best friend (see All Good People Here, The It Girl, The Shards , Stay Awake, Nice Girls and, well, let’s be honest and say that all of it might have started in 2004 with Veronica Mars and her desire to get to the bottom of the death of her BFF Lilly Kane. RIP, Lilly).

The next thing I noticed about The House in the Pines is that I was perpetually confused while reading it.

Was this a “meta” thing where I was supposed to be as confused as main character Maya, a pill-popping, gin-swilling Gen Z who is convinced that a mysterious older guy she was involved with as a teen caused her best friend to drop dead for no apparent reason seven years ago?

In the present, Maya is trying to kick a Klonopin addiction and the withdrawal is making her a bit … erratic.

The book’s narrative structure is also erratic at times. The House in the Pines jumped from present to past to present without any markers to orient the reader. I could have really used a heading for each chapter with the date.

Sometimes I could figure out where and when I was. For instance, Maya’s BFF Aubrey was dead, so the chapters with her in it were in the past. Dan was Maya’s boyfriend in the present, so that was a marker, until he just ghosted her in her time of need. But there was one chapter I got almost all the way through before I realized I Maya was actually in the present with Frank, not the past.

The POV was mostly Maya’s with the exception of one time the reader is just mysteriously teleported into Maya’s mother’s head for a few paragraphs.

The House in the Pines then sidetracked to Guatemala

Details in mysteries and thrillers are usually there for a reason. They are either potential clues or possible red herrings.

Maya tells us that in high school, her Guatemalan grandmother died and that she went to Guatemala City for the funeral. Okay. On this trip, she found an unfinished novel that her father had been writing. Was the book a clue, perhaps?

For a time I even wondered if The House in the Pines was going to turn paranormal, OR if the more mystical parts of The House in the Pines were intended to be a nod to the magical realism sometimes found in Latin American fiction. (In the book, Maya’s father was even studying literature with an emphasis on magical realism).

I have read and enjoyed books by Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel and Manuel Puig. I do not want to be so blinded by Western European rationalism that I am closed-minded to other ways of seeing the world and writing about it. (EVEN in a mystery, which seems like should be somewhat rational-ish…) So I kept this theory open until almost the end of the book.

But as peripherally interesting as this Guatemalan interlude was, it had little to do with the actual mystery (the death of Maya’s friend Aubrey and another girl, Cristina). And the book DOES try to explain everything in a big info-dump at the end. So I had to scratch that theory.

I was waiting for some cool (or at least logical) resolution to The House in the Pines that did not happen.

In the end, I found The House in the Pines promising but disappointing. I feel like my disappointment (and the book’s 3.27 Goodreads rating) has something to do with all the different plot threads and a lot to do with its classification as a mystery/thriller.

I think the most helpful thing I can say about The House in the Pines is that if you want to read it, you might enjoy it more if you don’t think of it as a thriller at all.

To me, The House In the Pines reads more like a coming of age/trauma and abuse recovery story with a side mystery.

The book’s synopsis makes it seem like Maya is an intrepid detective trying to find out what happened to her friend, but she’s more like a severely traumatized person trying to backtrack to the time when everything in her life went wrong.

I felt the book is really about the relationship between Maya and Frank (a creepy older librarian who tries to get Maya to abandon her plans for college and live with him) and how their relationship casts a dark shadow over her life in the present. That aspect of it reminded me quite a bit of My Dark Vanessa, another book about abuse and trauma. And this is what I think The House in the Pines is really about.

Was creepy librarian Frank a really a murderer or just an abuser? Was anyone murdered? Did Maya imagine it? Was she Frank’s unwilling accomplice? (I was really hoping the book would tease these more intriguing unreliable narrator possibilities, but no.)

You will find how Frank did murder people (if he did) but the answer is head-scratching and, as I argue above never seemed to me like the main driver of the book’s plot and theme.

If you want all the spoiler-y details on what DOES happen in the book (as best as I can figure out), you are in luck: check out my Spoiler Discussion for The House in the Pines.

If you read and loved this one, tell me why in comments. I’d love to hear a different perspective. Also check out my list of Mysteries and Thrillers by Hispanic and Latinx Authors!