After two years the family moved to St Andrews on the coast of Fife where Toon attended Madras College, where she won the Margaret Brown Medal for English in 2003.
[1] She "returned regularly for holidays" to Sutherland "until she was into her late teens"[2] and "the northern wilds have haunted her ever since, and form the backdrop to her debut novel".
The Guardian's reviewer said that it "inhabits the woods and fells like a secretive wild animal" and called it a "well-written tale" but said that "What lets the narrative down is its reliance on the conventional tropes of the ghost-story genre.
"[7] The Scotsman's reviewer found that "There’s much to admire in Pine" but that "There are, however, one or two issues with the predictability of the plot that detract from the whole."
while saying that the book is "carefully calibrated to make every single hair on the back of your neck stand up on end as if you'd just heard a twig snap behind you in a forest at midnight.