Nope. Nope, nope, nope, NOPE. Sorry, but this book made absolutely NO SENSE at all. It wasn't magical, it was confusing and irritating. The main character was rude and unlikable (and at one point called some girl she'd never even MET a b*tch for absolutely no reason!) and I hated reading from her POV. So I didn't bother finishing.

Received an ARC from the publisher for an honest review.

Amazing and Enchanting. Ever feel that you are lost in a book? What if that story was real and the characters were looking for a way out of the repetitive loop of a storyline that has become their life and their fate.
When the supernatural characters of Hinterland, the realm her estranged grandmother stories are set, begin to haunt Alice, she starts questioning what is fact and what is fiction.
Filled with literary references, this is the perfect twisted and original fairy tale for both teenage and adult readers. A novel that will haunt your dreams long after you are done reading.
We need Tales from the Hinterlands to be a real book!

If you follow me on twitter, you know that THE HAZEL WOOD has been one of my most anticipated 2018 releases. I probably asked for an ARC more times than anyone can count until someone took pity on me and sent me a copy (thank you, Rachel!).

THE HAZEL WOOD is good, I want to say that first. The writing is beautiful, I loved our main character, and I loved the premise of the book. However, I was also left wanting more… and not in a necessarily good way. I went into this book thinking that the majority of it would take place at the Hazel Wood, Alice’s reclusive grandmother’s estate. Maybe if I didn’t have it so firmly planted in my head that we would get more of that story- the story of Alice’s grandmother and Hazel Wood and Hinterland- I wouldn’t have been so disappointed.

The majority of the book, however, takes place in New York City and then on the road as Alice and Ellery set off to find the Hazel Wood and Alice’s mom, Ella. They keep running into Hinterland’s story characters along the way until Alice finally finds herself in Hinterland and learns the truth about herself, her mom, and her reclusive grandmother.

I think my biggest problem with the book was that I feel I didn’t get enough of the characters to actually care about them. There’s a scene that should have destroyed me (I don’t like when characters get hurt) but I was like “Yeah, ok, are we going to the Hazel Wood now?” We get these little snippets of backstory for the characters but it isn’t enough to make me fall in love with them. I think if we had gotten more of them, more of their story, more personality, I would have enjoyed the book more. But the characters felt super flat and replaceable to me.

As a fan of fairytales, I was just disappointed with the actual lack of fairytale and magic. Most of the book is just Alice talking about how she and her mom moved around a lot. Personally, if the majority of the book had taken place in Hinterland or in the Hazel Wood, I probably would have loved this.

Again, this isn’t a bad book. I enjoyed reading it but I definitely expected this to be one that I instantly preordered… and that’s just not happening.

I am obsessed...enthralled, enchanted, possibly even bewitched by this book. The Hazel Wood was an utterly all consuming, wild ride that melded the contemporary and the fantastic, the beautiful and the creepy, even horrific, to deliver a tale about what it means to write your own story.

Honestly and truly I think anyone who considers themselves part of the booklr community will find this a super rewarding read.

Summary:


Alice has never had roots, always moving, always running from the bad luck that dogs her and her mother at ever turn. She's the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine, the infamous author of The Hinterland. Though Alice has never read the stories, she feels an odd connection with the twisted fables she knows it contains. This affinity fast turns to fear when Alice returns home one day to find her mother missing and her grandmother's stories coming to life in the most terrifying way. With the help of a hardcore Hinterland fan named sellers Finch, she must escape the Stories and find her mother, but every move they make reveals more lies, mysteries, and deeper ties to the Hinterland than Alice ever suspected.

Review:

I LOVED this book. There is something so relatable magical and creepy about this two person family living on the road, this girl who remembers highways and streetlights and books better than her actual life.
In fact, Alice was one of the most relatable characters I've encountered. I felt a strong personal connection with her relationship with her mother, her nomad existence, and her love of books. Sometimes having a book lover as the main character can feel self-indulgent, but in this case, Alice and Ellery served as vehicles to the discussion of books, reading, writing, and storytelling that is a critical part of the theme of this story.
This isn't so much a fairytale as an love letter to stories, to those who read them and to those who write them--to the good and the bad of what it means to escape into fictional worlds.
Ellery and Alice were the kind of fanciful yet practical characters that make for great protagonists in a story where the real melts into the magical. Their friendship-with-potential was a subtle yet central part of the plot and I was genuinely surprised with how it progressed at every turn. Ellery's fate was at once shocking and satisfying, but I felt Alice was unfinished and I could see a follow up about either or both of them.
The plot itself was genuinely surprising with subtle foreshadowing and elements that made it feel like a familiar fairy tale and at the same time something wholly new and unique. Readers of fairy tales and fae stories will find this a particularly rewarding read, though it's more than accessible to those with no fairy tale knowledge.
Apart from the fantasy elements, this book also contains a very real perspective on class, on coming of age, on mother-daughter friendships, on being a teenager seeking your path in life. The message is especially relevant to book lovers who have spent their lives yearning for the kind of adventure they read about.
Albert has created an alternate multiverse where anything is possible if you're willing to pay the price, where magic can cross realms and stories can become reality, and I truly hope we see more of it in the future.

Similar Vibes:
The Iron Fey series (Kagawa), Enchanted (Kontis), Wintersong (Jae-Jones), Once Upon a Time (tv show), Grimm (tv show), The Raven Cycle (Stiefvater)



Disclaimer: I received this ebook as an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for honest feedback.

Ahhhhh!!!! I loved this book! Alice finds herself in the midst of magic and creatures that lurk in our world. She must solve the mystery of where her mother is while finding out about her true story along the way. I love her relationship with Finch. There has to be a sequel!!!!!!!!!!!!

'The Hazel Wood' is a new kind of fairy tale that doesn't follow any of the old rules.
Taking place in both our world, and the fairy tale land called The Hinterland, it is filled and interwoven with fairy tales that are much darker than Grimm's. The Hinterland is a vividly written world full of stories I wish I could read. There are characters in the book who are part of the Hinterland, and their stories are included in Althea's book, but you don't learn much about them past their names. While I did want more of the characters, the story itself was wonderful and I enjoyed reading it.

Dark fantasy that borders on creepy. Albert has quite a few references I didn't quite know and the story kept taking sharp turns, so at times I felt disconnected. Curios how they plan to adapt this to the big screen... feels somewhat like Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children... somewhat...

How a book can be creepy, full of imagination, magical and still be funny… Is unbelievable... this book is definitely going to be a cult classic and have a crazy band of followers, okay I might be one of them, don't judge!

Incorporating fairy tales old and new, real and made up for the purposes of this book, Hazel Wood is a fantastic and richly layered read. I had to stop and recall some of the references (such as Angela Carter), which made this book even more credible in my mind. I will be recommending this story to anyone I know who loves fantasy, fairy tales, and twisted fairy tales. Perfect for fans of :Once", Snow White and the Huntsman, and Mercedes Lackey.

There's a kind of precariousness to loving a book right from the beginning- a feeling of holding your breath as your silently whisper a mantra of <i>please be good, please don't disappoint me.</I> But then, sometimes, a book will 100% deliver and have you sitting there at the end, staring, completely gobsmacked that it just wrapped you around its little finger.

This was one of those books for me. It completely and utterly gripped me from the first page. It hit me on every level- characters, plot, language, world-building.

The story follows Alice, a 17-year-old girl who's spent her whole life moving from one place to another with her mother, trying to outrun the bad luck that always seems to dog them. It's always been just the two of them, Alice and Ella, but lurking and unspoken on the periphery has been the legend of her grandmother, Althea, a reclusive author of a single volume of dark fairy tales that burned bright for a time and then dropped into obscurity, all of the copies mysteriously gone, the movie made about it lost to time. Despite, or maybe because of, these strange disappearances, there is a huge fan following of the collection, complete with secretive message boards and conspiracy theories.

When Ella and Alice get a message that Althea has died, Ella thinks that the bad luck is finally over and decides to settle them down- but the question then it's whether or not this has just given it a chance to finally catch up to them.

The first thing I have to talk about is the writing. I love the clarity of Albert's prose- it is beautiful, sly, sharp, raw, evocative. This book is steeped in creeping dread as it unfurls, gorgeously magical but at the same time wholly real and unsentimental.

Albert's carefully crafted descriptions feel so purposeful, like they are boiled down to the perfect distillation of meaning where not a single word could be added or subtracted to make it better. The writing never distracts from the story or the pace, however, and it knows when to relax a bit and trade rigid control for some momentum.

Seriously, though, check out some of these lines:

"She sucked in smoke like it was a milk shake"
"Unspoken things bloomed at the back of my throat, then went cold."
"Everything had a revelatory crispness, like a new day seen through the lense of a coffee-feuled all-nighter."

The <i>atmosphere</i> here!

On top of the writing and the world Albert has created, we have our main character, Alice. I love the space she takes up in this world. She is not a soft ingenue hungering for approval- she is smart, sullen, and full of rage. She is apart from the rest of humanity, an insular girl that's fiercely loyal to her mother and no one else. She is unapologetically herself and screw anyone who demands she be something else- And I <i>love</i> her for it.

I don't usually do the "best of..." label, but this has got to be a contender of best book of the year for me- especially for adult novels. Sure, it's probably going to end up in the teen section, but I think this will appeal much more to adults. Anyone picking this up shouldn't expect a romance-soaked coming of age romp, but rather a grown-up fairy tale with teeth.

With the extensive pre-publication marketing for this title (which is due to release January 2018), my expectations were high.

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert grabbed me from page one and kept me coming back for more. I absolutely loved the first half of the book and found myself thinking about the story when I wasn’t reading it. I craved it, wanting to know what was going to happen next.

Things slowed down at the halfway point, and I found myself tiring of all the similes and metaphors. As I became hyperaware of every time the word “like” was used, I also started to notice every time the word “felt” was used. According to my Kindle, the word “like” was used over 500 times in the book. (The Kindle stopped counting at 500.) Granted, some of those “likes” were in dialogue, but most were similes. The word “felt” was used 120 times in the story.

Additionally, some of the metaphors seemed quite mixed to me, and I didn’t understand them. For example, “I felt stunned and flayed, a nerve ending exposed to cold sun.” (location 1299 in Kindle)

There were also descriptions I absolutely loved. Here are a few of my favorites:

“His tie was a loud yellow, his suit an exhausted brown.” (location 1307 in Kindle)

“A boy whose eyes were the alert, shiny color of sunlight through Coke …” (location 1086 in Kindle)

“A the moment she let go her last breath, the white light shuddered and went green. The green of infected wounds, of nightmares, of the rind of mold that crawled over week-old bread.” (location 1836 in Kindle)

“… a gray sky pressed against winter-crisped grass.” (location 2565 in Kindle)

The Hazel Wood is an adventure-filled story with constant unanswered story questions that will keep readers turning the pages to discover how the story will end.

I look forward to Melissa Albert’s next book.

{I received an advance reader copy from the publisher through Net Galley, which in no way influenced by review of the book.}

This is a hard book to review.

The Hazel Wood is a dark fantasy that plays with classic fairytales. I love classic fairytales and it is clear where Albert drew her inspiration. The overall plot was interesting and was what pushed me through the book. However, I found the writing dense, the world building inconsistent and the characters...mediocre.

I cannot quite put my finger on what I do not like about our heroine, Alice, but I felt it difficult to connect with her or any of the supporting characters.

The first half of the book I found incredibly difficult to read and really had to convince myself to push through. It was not until the second half of the book that I felt more engaged with the book as the plot finally picked up. I can see how this could make a good film as the suspense will probably play off better on screen.

Overall, this book is okay... I may give it another read down the road just to see if i feel differently.

This book. I was drawn to it because of the cover (yes, I totally judged this book by its cover) and I was delighted to find an intriguing, creepy tale about fairy tales.

Reading about Alice and her mother's very transient lifestyle and the mother's refusal to contact her mother, the author of a cult-status collection of dark fairy stories from the Hinterland, sets the stage. When Alice's mother, Ella, receives word that her mother has passed away, Ella hopes that they will be free, but Alice isn't sure what they are supposed to be free from.

When Ella disappears Alice is left with no choice but to ask her classmate Ellery (who kind of comes across as a manic pixie dream guy....is that even a thing? I mean, he looks like young Bob Dylan, dresses like a hipster, and has a Vonnegut tattoo.) for help. Ellery, a fan of the Hinterland stories, soon realizes that the dangerous, dark characters from the stories are real and are coming for Alice.

Things take a freaky turn (to the point that I decided to stop reading late at night) and Alice finds herself in the Hinterland trying to save her mother and herself.

Albert's tale was original and slightly terrifying. I look forward to adding a copy to my library's collection when it comes out.

The story itself was incredibly magical, whimsical, creepy, gritty, and unique, but the writing was what really drew me in! It tells the story of Alice, who has to fight her way into a fairy tale land to rescue her mother. But that's just the premise: there are twists and surprises around every corner. The fairy tales written are so unique yet they feel timeless, like they must have existed for centuries. These creepy tales will give readers goosebumps. Its like a odd mix of The Magicians, Alice in Wonderland, The Darkest Part of the Forest, and the Raven Cycle. Mesmerizing! What a unique reading experience! I highly recommend.

Wow. This book is mysterious, beautiful, enticing, unique.... the list goes on and on. The stand out for me was the writing. It was masterfully done and simply added to the story. There's a plot here that could fall apart if not done well, but it ends up being a wonderfully eloquent book. 4.5 stars

Do you believe in fairytales? If you answered yes, do you think you could survive in a fairytale world? Alice Crewe knows nothing about the world of fairytales, called The Hinterland here, until her famous grandmother dies. Althea Proserpine wrote a mysterious, rare book of completely original tales after disappearing in the European woods for several years. All Alice knows about Althea is that she and her mother, Ella, have been running from her for years. But now she’s dead and everything changes. Ella disappears, Alice is being followed, and weird things are happening wherever Alice goes. She becomes focused on finding Ella, and the trail eventually leads her to Althea’s mysterious compound deep in the forests of upstate New York. There Alice discovers the true story behind her birth, her relationship with her mother, and her role in the Hinterland.

Everyone knows there is a dark side to fairytales, and Melissa Albert freely explores that darkness in a fresh and inventive manner in this debut novel. Albert has been writing for teens and an online audience for a long time, and that experience has resulted in a richly plotted, beautifully written, imaginative reboot of the fairytale world. What if the stories are real? What happens when the order of things is disrupted? What happens when the stories change? Alice definitely shakes things up when she gets into The Hinterland. She's the clod in the churn, the pebble in the shoe, and she is most definitely *not* the "Alice" as written into the story 'Alice-Three-Times." At one point, when she is acting all contrary to the story, she says

"I did it because a girl doing nothing in a fairytale ends up dead or worse, but a girl who makes a decision usually gets a reward."
Seems like a sensible choice to me!

Albert explores many themes here: people who use stories to escape from their real lives, people who manipulate others to affect the outcome of a story, people who challenge the status quo for love, people who *can* and *do* change. Alice and Ella are both flawed characters, but you end up loving them in spite of their flaws simply because they love each other so fiercely. The Hazel Wood is a little bit Beautiful Creatures meets The Matrix and is dead-on entertaining. Highly recommended.

Publication Date: January 30, 2018
Published by Flatiron Books
Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy.

A dark, twisted fairy tale about a girl who must risk everything to save her mother-and herself-from being trapped in the Hazel Wood. Intriguing plot, especially if you like stories that begin "once upon a time"....

An intriguing and engrossing read. I read it all in one sitting, especially enjoying the writing. Descriptions are spot on, really pulling the reader in. In a world where authors frequently describe the air as being heavy with this flower or that (and there is some of that in this book) it was refreshing to read that Alice and Ella's car smelled of the 'plasticky strawberry' of a lip smackers long ago shoved into an air vent. The author did a very good job keeping the reader (and Alice) off-kilter, after magical other-worldly encounters Dora the Explorer sleeping bags are mentioned. I especially loved the scenes in Hazel Wood, the estate. There were so many interesting story lines introduced: Althea's past, Ella's childhood, the refugees, the Stories, Alice's journey, the bad luck, Althea's books, and more.

I would recommend this book to teens and younger adult readers. I think the descriptions I read so far, most especially those calling the book extremely creepy, fit for a younger audience only. I found myself wishing many times this book had been written for an adult audience. I would have loved more time spent in the Hazel Wood house, learning the truth of Althea's life. I felt the creepy parts only skimmed instead of really digging in, which kept them from being as frightening. I would have liked deeper relationships, such as between Ella and Althea, and the Spinner and Althea. The 'refugees' could have been such an interesting concept. Once again, the romance felt skimmed for me. It was realistic, the struggle and awkwardness and confusion, but it just needed more to anchor it and make it real. I think younger audiences wont feel that way, but adult readers of magical realism may be left wanting more and not in the give me a sequel or prequel way. (Although I'd read both, hoping for a deeper look at this world.)