The Hazel Wood is a part of my 2020 Resolution Project. I have 20 books that qualify as speculative on my shelves that I have yet to read — and that I have owned many for several years. The Hazel Wood, however, is not one of those books. I bought this book only a handful of months ago, although I’ve desired it for much longer. Since it came out, in fact. No — since I first saw it as an Advance Reader Copy many months before that. But that ARC I couldn’t take because it was a part of a promotional bookstore thing and a cool giveaway item. But I’ve wanted it ever since. Creepy houses tucked away in foreboding enchanted woods? Kidnapped mothers and malicious fairy tales? Color me interested. Plus the cover is the kind your fingers itch to touch; black with shiny gold twisting vines with silvery fairy tale-inspired elements scattered about. I’m a sucker for fairy tales, so it really is no surprise this book has been on my radar for so long.
The Hazel Wood (2018)
Written by: Melissa Albert
Genre: YA Fantasy
Pages: 368 (Hardcover)
Series: The Hazel Wood Book 1
Publisher: Flatiron Books
The Premise:
Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: Her mother is stolen away — by a figure who claims to come from the Hinterland, the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother’s stories are set. Alice’s only lead is the message her mother left behind: “Stay away from the Hazel Wood.”
Alice has long steered clear of her grandmother’s cultish fans. But now she has no choice but to ally with classmate Ellery Finch, a Hinterland superfan who may have his own reasons for wanting to help her. To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother’s tales began — and where she might find out how her own story went so wrong.
No spoilers
Discussion: Much of this book is Alice’s journey to the Hazel Wood. She’s an almost detached character who cares about her mother but pushes other people away due to the life she’s led, among other things. She also has a very powerful temper that she occasionally has to wrestle back into its cage. Her whole demeanor was very interesting, and I was almost correct in my guess about her past, though I think anyone with a lick of sense would pick up on it. But I liked Alice, and despite her attempts to be in control and logical, she had very human reactions to things.
Finch was a fun and interesting character as well. I kept wondering where his particular story thread would lead, because I wasn’t convinced that it would be to Alice, and vice versa. The possibility was there, but it just didn’t seem to be the likeliest of outcomes. He was a very useful tool for Alice in some respects, and a good counter-person for her to bounce off of — like a candle in the gloom. Just enough light, but not enough to turn her away. Especially since it’s clear Finch has his own demons to deal with.
I loved the feel of this book. The atmosphere. Everything seems normal enough — or at least, as normal as it can be in Alice’s world — but then it all starts sliding into a dark fairy tale land. And I’m not talking Brothers Grimm dark. Those stories are like pools of bright yellow paint with drops of black in them. The tales that stalk Alice, her mother, and Finch are like tragic princesses sloshing through a dim mire with muck made of horror up to their ankles and no end in sight. If that makes any sense. These people (for lack of a better word) come straight from the stories in Tales from the Hinterland, the book Alice’s grandmother wrote. The few stories included in The Hazel Wood that readers are treated to are more like horror stories than the kind of fairy tales we’re used to, so the entire time I imagined the Hinterland as this dim, Gothic sort of forest. I won’t describe what it actually was, but suffice to say that once I finally arrived there on the page, it was not what I expected. But for most of the book it felt far more like horror than fantasy, and the first time I had to put in a bookmark and go to bed I wondered if I would have a nightmare or two since my imagination can occasionally be a real bastard.
I thought it was interesting that Melissa Albert chose the name “Hinterland.” I knew it was Germanic and kept thinking the word was associated with the woods or back country of Germany. Turns out it does. Given that it can translate to “the land behind,” it definitively works for this story. I couldn’t ever stop thinking German though, but oh well.
I do have some questions about this universe, however. Mostly about the rules regarding stories and their ability to move independently. Because it sounded like some are locked in the Hinterland and can’t leave at all, yet others are happily gallivanting around in the human world, occasionally eating or otherwise murdering people. So what gives? Why are some able to do that and not others? That aside, I think I’m good on everything. There were some surprises, and the book took a left turn I didn’t see coming (again, mostly in what the Hinterland actually turned out to be), and I got an ending that made me happy, which is what I always want in my books if at all possible.
In Conclusion: Chances are if I lived in this world, I’d either end up reading Tales from the Hinterland or falling into the Hinterland myself. But I suppose that applies to most of us out here reading books like these.
Will I read the next book? I don’t know. Maybe? I appreciated how this felt like a complete story. Like it didn’t need a second or third book. It is truly refreshing to stumble into one of those now and again. Maybe at some point in the future I will, but I already have a massive reading list to deal with — and that includes my 2020 Resolution Project. Frankly, at this point I’m waiting for Melissa Albert to publish a full version featuring all the Hinterland tales she gave titles to. Maybe she doesn’t have stories for all of them, but it would be dandy if she did.
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