Melissa Albert

This is a gorgeous fairy-tale-inspired novel about Alice, the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine, the author of the cult classic fairy tale collection Tales from the Hinterlands. Alice and her mother Ella live a life on the road, never staying too long in any one place before bad luck catches up to them and they wind up somewhere else. But when they receive a letter saying that Althea has died, Ella marries Harold, a wealthy New Yorker, in hopes of giving Alice a little more stability. It show more works for a while -- and then one day Alice comes home from school to find her mother, stepfather, and stepsister missing; an unsettling green smell in the apartment; and a torn page from Tales from the Hinterlands on her pillow, the first page of the story "Alice-Three-Times." With the assistance of her classmate Ellery Finch (an Althea Proserpine fan as only someone with the funds to buy rare first editions can be), she sets out to recover her mother. Their only clue: the mysterious location of Althea's upstate New York estate, the Hazel Wood.

*The Hazel Wood* is a gorgeous and complex novel about identity, family, and fairy tales. Althea's stories are dark enough to be borderline horror, but they carry that fairy-tale enchantment with them, the sense that there are rules and patterns that may not be immediately visible. Alice is a terrific character, angry and impulsive in a way female characters often aren't allowed to be. I loved her fierce devotion to her mother despite the many revelations about both of their pasts that come throughout the book. Highly recommended for fans of Angela Carter and Naomi Novik. show less

Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood is a young adult fantasy novel that twines familiar tropes of fairy tales and fantasies–princesses, magical objects, challenges, quests, and magic into something entirely new, exciting, and deeply dangerous. It is a thrilling, inventive, and highly original fantasy that takes place in the here and now.

Alice and her mother, Ella, have lived their lives on the road, moving once or twice a year, sleeping in cars, borrowed houses, and cheap motels, seemingly show more trailed by bad luck that always seems to find them with terrible consequences for people and places around them. However, shortly after learning that Althea, Ella’s mother died, Ella got married to a wealthy man and now Alice is living in a fancy upscale apartment with a stepsister named Audrey who is the same age. Things should be looking up, but then one day she sees a man who she is certain is the same man who kidnapped her years ago, claiming he was taking her to see her grandmother.

Alice’s grandmother was a famous author who wrote “Tales from the Hinterland” an electrifyingly original collection of fairy tales, grim and reportorial stories of magical beings that are scary and horrifying. Something happened in the past that drove Ella to take Alice on the road, on the run from her mother, so that Alice has no memory of ever knowing her. She’s also never read her mother’s famous book, a book that is oddly impossible to find, even with e-bay.

However, things seem to be coming to a head with the reappearance of her abductor who seems to have aged not at all, with cryptic clues in the form of pages torn from her grandmother’s book, and with a new friendship with Ellery Finch, a classmate who has read Althea’s books.

I loved The Hazel Wood. From the first page, I was enthralled, at first by what seemed a coming-of-age story of a unique and self-aware young woman whose life experiences are different from most–a traveling life of a reader. More than the events that happened, she remembers the places she lived by the books she read. I can see that.

I like how the magical elements of the story were slowly revealed, what seems coincidence crystallizing into magical interference. We are not thrust into the fantasy immediately. Alice has lived an unusual life, but there’s no reason to see anything fantastical. Lots of kids have grown up with peripatetic parents who drag them from school to school, living as perpetual “new kids” in school. She self-protective, prickly, a bit stand-offish and it all makes sense, she’s spent a lifetime losing friends. She feels rage and even that makes sense. We assume there must be some reason her mother fled with her.

And then when Alice has no choice but to go to her grandmother’s home and enter that magical world, it’s so new and different. Yes, the tropes of fairy tales are there, bits of verse with clues, anthropomorphic beasts, talking trees, and scary things. But it’s also beautiful and inhabited by other humans who have found their way there. It’s scary, deadly, terrifying and lovely, friendly, and somehow familiar and those contradictions are not the least bit false.

The Hazel Wood is completely original, utterly captivating, and puts its characters in real jeopardy so readers will feel real anxiety over the fate of its characters. There are no guarantees in this book and you can sense that from the first approaches toward the Hazel Wood. That uncertainty, not knowing what might happen in the end, makes this much much more thrilling.

I received an Advance Readers Copy of The Hazel Wood from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Hazel Wood at Flatiron Books | Macmillan
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A favorite book of the year! This is definitely for readers who grew up enjoying the most disturbing of the Grimm's fairy tales. It's not cute, sweet, or nice, and I LOVED it! It also follows a main character that I think some readers would deem "unlikeable," but I thought it was refreshing to follow someone that wasn't constantly concerned about stepping on others toes. Alice is strong, and she's angry, and she isn't concerned with whether or not she is liked by others. I think it sometimes show more makes readers uncomfortable to come across those qualities in a female main character, whereas if the character were male, they would accept those same qualities without a second thought. I think Melissa Albert did an incredible job writing this book! I could never predict what was going to happen next in the plot, or what her characters would do next, which kept me riveted throughout. Looking forward to reading the next book in the series! show less

Alice and her mother Ella have always been on the road. Bad luck follows them everywhere and it wasn't uncommon to take off on short notice, in the middle of the night. This has been her life ever since she can remember until the grandmother she never met Althea, a reclusive and little known fantasy author. Ella suddenly settles down and marries a wealthy man. Months into the marriage, it's clear that divorce is on the horizon. Alice comes home one night to find the apartment empty with a show more weird smell. Her stepsister and violent stepfather eventually return, driving her from her home, but Ella stays missing. Alice goes to Ellerey, one of her few friends, for help and vows to find her mother.

The Hazel Wood combines the real world and a dark, dangerous fairy tale world populated by nuanced, realistic characters and frightening fantastical characters alike. Alice isn't afraid to tell harsh truths to people and comes off as abrasive. Her anger skates below the surface of her facade and it comes out at times. It's understandable since no one but her mother stays in her life for any extended period of time. Even the people she's with every day never get very close. Once she and Ellerey commence their search, strange things start to happen. Alice sometimes responds to these unexplainable events in irrational, dangerous ways. I was disturbed to see that so many readers didn't like Alice when so many abusive young men whose actions are much worse are revered as attractive and romantic. Women and girls are still looked down upon for having unbecoming emotions.

The story takes a while to venture into fantasy and horror. At first, Althea's dark fairy tales from the Hinterland are told to Alice by Ellerey, including Twice Killed Katherine who avenges her own death by draining the life out of men. Althea's novel is mysteriously absent with no library copies or digital copies and very rare physical copies. The two worlds overlap when Alice sees Katherine in real life. She and Ellerey find a way to the Hazel Wood, Althea's estate, but have to overcome trials to enter the actual Hinterland that has been bleeding into the real world through her stories. These tales are so unlike our traditional ones. There are no set rules (safe one), no morality, and no judgment. The only one in power is the story spinner and the characters must cycle through their stories over and over to keep the Hinterland existing. It's much different than any other fantasy novel I've read.

The Hazel Wood takes horrific fairy tales and blends them with the real world. There are grave consequences for tangling with fairy tale creatures and happily ever after doesn't really exist. Melissa Albert creates such an interesting world with unexpected traits and keeps the reader mesmerized with her masterful writing. The story wasn't predictable at all and I was eager to meet every twist and turn. I'm especially happy that the typical romance was subverted and chnaged in the end. I couldn't stop reading this book and I had to know how it ended. show less