i just could not get into this book. the writing style was not for me and it felt very disjointed. i was confused by the time jumps and it really felt like an amalgamation of plot points and tropes i do like individually but they just did not work well when put together here.

3.5 rounded up

This is a fun and quick nostalgic read! I really love duel timelines and POV’s so that was a plus. It wasn’t anything spectacular but it’s definitely worth a read!

Unfortunately, this book just didn't work for me. I could not care about the story or what was happening at all. I really enjoyed this author's previous book series but for some reason, this story didn't connect with me at all. I don't think it was necessarily bad, I, personally, just did not care about what was going to happen next at any point.

I read this ARC via Netgalley Shelf.

When Ivy and her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend near run over a naked girl in the woods, Ivy feels something strange about her. Then the dead rabbits appear, and Ivy's mother Dana disappears. As Ivy begins to find clues about the secret her mother has been carrying for the past twenty years, she also begins to uncover an affinity for magic.

I loved The Hazel Wood and this did not disappoint! The writing was lyrical and lovely, adding to the fairy-esque feeling of the magic. Although the shifts from Ivy's POV to Dana's POV and also third-person chapters in theirs and other POVs didn't flow as nicely as they could (chapters from Ivy's POV were labelled as "the suburbs - right now" and Dana's were "the city - back then"), I really enjoyed all the different perspectives - I just wished the author had chosen all third person or labelled each first person or something. Dana's flashbacks gave me flashbacks of "The Craft" in all the best ways. Ivy's storyline with her missing memories and the connection to a fairytale was also nicely done. The pacing kept this moving quickly. Definitely one of my favorite reads lately!

Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert is an urban fantasy thriller filled with mystery, magic, and witchcraft. I enjoyed Albert's previous works, The Hazel Wood and The Night Country, so I'm thankful to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for the opportunity to receive an advanced readers copy.
Ivy and her boyfriend are driving home from a party. They almost hit a girl on their way back in the dark. This sets off a chain of events. Someone breaks into their house, Ivy's mother goes missing, and certain memories seem to be missing. Meanwhile, we also get flashbacks of Ivy's mother's childhood. With her two friends and their discovery of a magical secret, they set off a chain of events that now is affecting Ivy in the present.
The split pov is easy to follow and both sides of the story were interesting and well spaced out, slowly revealing the mystery. It is delightfully creepy and filled with lots of magic and secrets. I enjoyed every moment of reading this book.

I really loved the concept of this book. If you're into atmospheric stories you'll love this one. For me, the writing style felt too distracting to really be immersed in the actual story.

This was a dual timeline story and I'll be honest - I was always just trying to get through the "past" scenes bc I was much more interested in the present. Unfortunately my favorite storylines were more subplot and only took up a few pages :(

My overall thoughts on this are that it was a good book but just not really for me.

I received a free ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I want to preface this by saying that I loved The Hazel Wood, but not The Night Country (which went a little off-rails in my opinion.) I am also going to write quite a lot about this book, including SPOILERS, so if you don't want to know everything, pray read no further.

This story is told through two narratives, that of Dana, the mother, and Ivy, the daughter. Both women are witches, though Ivy does not know that for a good, long while. Both voices sound the same to me. Dana's narrative takes place in the 90s and Ivy's is contemporary.

Dana's story involves her small coven and a horrible decision that she was sort of forced to make that resulted in the imprisonment of her friend Marion with an occultist that Marion had tried to release in order to gain more power. After that incident Dana slowly moves on with her life, avoiding magic, until Ivy begins to show a strong aptitude for it as a child.

Ivy's story is about the choices that her mother made to protect her from some unfortunate truths as well as from herself.

Dana and her best friend Fee essentially told themselves that Marion was dead as the only way of being able to cope with the consequences of what had happened. But Marion was alive and apparently plotting her revenge the entire time. In her purgatory, Marion spies on Dana and discovers the birth of Ivy and the fact that Ivy will potentially grow to be an intensely powerful witch.

Ivy, being a PITA teenager decides she will use magic to figure out the secret that Dana is hiding from her. Ivy discovers Marion in her purgatory and Marion tells her everything (conveniently leaving out why the hell Dana had to throw her in the hole in the first place) and Ivy, being a PITA teenager automatically assumes that Marion is telling her the whole truth and nothing but the truth and doesn't bother to ask for her mom's version of events. When Dana discovers what Ivy has been doing she realizes that she needs to do something. Ivy does what all annoying kids do and says, "You can't stop me." And then Dana whips out a magic box that steals memories. She uses it in an attempt to have her daughter forget all of the BAD things about magic, but it kind of takes EVERYTHING about magic, including her friendship with her best friend, Billy, from across the street.

So, Ivy forgets Marion, Marion goes back into purgatory, and Dana is stuck with a shell of a daughter that causes intense guilt whenever she interacts with her. Time passes and Ivy is 17. Marion finally decides she wants to bust out of her prison, so she finds a way to unravel it and wills herself into existence. Which, what took you so long, but do you. She runs into Ivy in real life, kidnaps Dana and Fee and starts to fuck with Ivy's mind, eventually opening her memory box and bringing everything Ivy lost back to her. Unfortunately, Marion miscalculated in assuming that Ivy wanted her mom to die because of what she did. Ivy goes to rescue her mother and Fee and succeeds in convincing Marion to just let it all go. She then traps Marion's memories of Dana, Ivy, and Fee so that Marion will wake up and basically be able to start over.

There's a few interesting parts to the novel, but it isn't particularly astounding.

One of the things that I enjoyed about the book was that it was dominated by female characters and while Ivy was a little formulaic and Fee was totally underdeveloped, (c'mon she easily had the most interesting innate ability) Dana is complex and well-written.

Now I'll discuss why this book didn't get more stars.

The male characters are reduced to nothing but stereotypes. Nate, Rob, Billy. Shitty boyfriend, out-of-touch dad, love interest. Rob could have potentially been just as complex as Dana but his motivation for staying with her was reduced to "stay together for the kids." Even Dana's father and Uncle Nestor were bland.

The similes and word choice in general. By Part 3, they were totally overdone. I think it would not have gotten to me so bad, except that some of her descriptions were.... nonsensical in a jarring way. Like, I would sit there trying to figure out what the fuck Albert was trying to say and then wrote it off in my head as, someone gave this to her and said, "add more adverbs!" I first noticed this when she described something as "glittered septically." I was so confused by this wording that I spent 20 minutes trying to interpret it. I never came to any kind of realization. Another weird one was "the sweet bakery funk of deteriorating paper."

The forced romance. If Billy had been a more strongly developed character, perhaps it would have felt more natural, but I mean it felt so totally unnecessary. While his character was essential to the plot, we could have just as easily left Billy as her bestie and been absolutely fine.

The lack of difference in character voice. If you're going to hop between two narrators with both in first-person, they need to sound like different people.

Overall, this book is okay, but not one I would strongly recommend. If you want a witchy story, there are way more better options.

Thank you to Flatiron Books and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

When I saw that the author of The Hazel Wood had a new book out, I knew that I had to request it right away!
Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert is a contemporary YA fantasy that will give you chills up and down your spine. The story revolves around 17 year-old Ivy, who suddenly sees something scary in the woods one night. Is this creature the herald of horrors to come? Or has Ivy always been surrounded by black magic?

Here is a chilling excerpt from Chapter 1:

"We were going too fast. Too close to the trees, weeds feathering over our headlights, whisking away.
“Nate.” I gripped the passenger seat. “Nate.”
Fifteen minutes ago we were at an end-of-year party, jumping up and down with our hands on each other’s shoulders, and all the time I was thinking, I should break up with him. I should do it now. I have to break up with him now. Then he cupped my face in his hands and told me he loved me, and I was too startled to tell even half a lie.
I followed him out of the house, over the lawn, into his car, still saying all the useless things you say when you’ve bruised someone’s ego and they think it’s their heart. He slammed too hard into reverse, then sloshed over the curb peeling away, and still it took me a block to realize he was drunk."

Overall, Our Crooked Hearts is a nostalgic YA fantasy that will appeal to fans of The Craft or The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. One highlight of this book is the terrifying beginning, which scared me so much. I definitely second-guessed reading this book at night. Another highlight of this book was how it made me feel nostalgic for my teenage years, going to parties, etc. I did take off 1 star, because I wish that the plot had been more action-packed. If you're intrigued by the excerpt above, or if you're a fan of YA fantasy books in general, I recommend that you check out this book when it comes out in June!

It’s a bitter pill to swallow when one of your most anticipated reads of the year underwhelms, a sentiment I unfortunately have to share about Melissa Albert’s standalone YA fantasy Our Crooked Hearts. Albert is an author I have enormous expectations for at every release, as her debut novel in 2018 was my exact flavor of fairytale-esque fantasy with a dark twist, combined with the most beautiful prose I’d seen from a debut author. She takes a bit of a different direction with this latest book, veering more into urban fantasy, with the familiar throughline of an abrasive relationship between mother and daughter. The former of which has suddenly gone missing at the start of the novel.

To start, the use of dual timelines here was an underutilized narrative choice, made even more distracting by the nearly interchangeable voices of mother and daughter. The amount of overlap between the characters that were in both timelines only confused things further, and I found myself having to take a moment to pause and re-orient myself in the story to get a sense of where and when I was. Neither Ivy nor her mother ever felt like totally realized characters to me, just mouthpieces for two young girls discovering urban magic in two separate timelines. And while the looming mystery of what presence was stalking Ivy in her present day storyline added some intrigue here, I wouldn’t have missed the POV swapping to her mother’s timeline in the past and her girlgang shenanigans.

These Crooked Hearts could have been a more powerful story if it had focused entirely on the tumultuous relationship between mother and daughter, and the mystery of Marion. Having to shoehorn in a romance subplot with the neighbor boy Billy felt a bit like a piece of obligatory YA marketing. He could have not existed at all, or simply been a friend, and the story itself would fundamentally have been the same. Just without the distracting presence of a romance that really should not have taken center stage with a missing mother on the loose. And, you know, the life-altering discovery that the dark workings of modern-day witches were real.

I’ve yet to recapture that same magic from Melissa Albert’s debut with The Hazel Wood, regardless of her prose absolutely delivering in all four books she’s released thus far. As such, she’s an author I will continue to pick up everything she writes, because I feel she’s still there on the precipice of writing something back in my happy place of eerie fairytales and forests that swallow their inhabitants whole. Unfortunately, this latest release leaning more into urban fantasy didn’t quite deliver in this regard, but I think there’s a reader for it regardless.

Thank you to the publisher Flatiron books for providing an ARC via NetGalley for an honest review.

This book was a great mystery for people who love The Craft! It’s mysterious, spooky, and slightly unsettling in the best way.

It’s summer break but it starts oddly for Ivy. A breakup, an accident, a strange mystery woman. As more odd events occur, Ivy begins to think it starts with her mother and her mysterious past.

If you like young adult and witchy books, this was the perfect combination. It had dual time lines and unfortunately I was way into one timeline more than the other, but that’s just how it happens at times. I really liked the mystery of the past and the mother/daughter relationship. The spells and witchy aspect reminded me of a modern day The Craft. If you’re a fan of bunnies, you may want to skip this one because there’s a lot of them that don’t survive.

“We were three damp ducklings, green as leaves, believing with all our crooked hearts that we were the ones writing this story. Even as a dead woman’s book paved the road beneath our feet.”

Our Crooked Hearts comes out 6/28.

4.5 stars. Very enjoyable, witchy story. The author is very talented at writing dysfunctional family situations.

This book is a treasure trove of genuinely fantastic character development. I don't think there is a single character that is not morally gray, in that is amazing. It's hard to do that and still have the characters be likeable, and maybe Dana isn't someone you want as a friend, but you understand her. Dark, twisty, and something that will be incredibly difficult to put down. This is peak "just one more chapter" reading.

What an atmospheric book!

I liked the spookiness as well as the writing. The author uses countless metaphors throughout the story to set the scene or characterizations; I thought many of them were clever, but I can see why it wouldn't be someone's cup of tea.

The plot was unique and interesting, but I felt like it could've been paced differently. The story is told in two different timelines: one present day through Ivy (main character) and one from the past through Dana (Ivy's mom). There's an overarching mystery that is unravelled throughout the book but all the revelations occur in what felt like the last 10%. I think if there were some more clues dropped throughout the storylines, it would be a much more attention holding.

Overall, this was full of creepy, witchy vibes and I think this would make an excellent Fall read.

On the surface, Our Crooked Hearts is the story of a daughter right now and a mother back then. But look a little deeper and you'll find there's so much more to this story. As Ivy struggles to uncover the truth about her mother in the present, in the past Dana and her friends play with powerful forces that leads to consequences they could never have imagined.

I whipped through this book in about a day because, honestly, I couldn't put it down. Ivy and Dana came to life, and I couldn't stop following Ivy on her quest for the truth and Dana as her power grew until there was no turning back. While Ivy appears naive and troubled, Dana strides through life carefree and reckless at times. Though they were so different I was invested in each of their stories. All I can say is run don't walk to pick up this book and expect the unexpected when you do.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC. I highly recommend this book.

Summary:
This dark YA mystery/fantasy is told on two different timelines. The first is present day from the POV of 17 year old Ivy, who gets in an accident and during that sees a mysterious woman in the street. This event sets off a string of creepy happenings. It also forces Ivy to question if her mom, Dana, is keeping secrets from her.
The second time line is in the past and is told from the POV of 16 year old, Dana. We find that her and her group of friends are into dark magic and witchcraft and the choices they make have a impact of on the future.

Review: I really enjoyed this book. It was fast paced and really reminded me of a modern day dark fairy tale. I not only loved the dark magic elements of the book, but also the fractured relationship between mother and daughter

Another rough outing for the tropey YA Fantasy parents who bring some ungodly mess down on their unsuspecting kid while bleating “I only lied to protect you!”

Maybe it’s me, but I think if you have some sort of angry supernatural force from your past hanging around and potentially wishing you harm, you miiiihht want to prepare your kids for this possibility rather than locking them in a tower/living on the run/mind wiping them/whatever the strategy for a particular plot is for setting one’s own children up to be uninformed and in terrible danger.

So—surprise!—I didn’t much care for Dana. I didn’t like her much in the first timeline either, but her story itself isn’t bad.

And essentially, that’s what this book is: Not bad. This isn’t nearly as good as the Hazel Wood books (this one is really low on atmosphere and isn’t especially original). But it moves well, the plot itself is fine in a basic sense, and Ivy (if not Dana) makes for a good heroine.

Our Crooked Hearts is a wild tale of teenage witches who make a terrible mistake.

Ivy has grown up knowing that her mother was different. She knew her mother could make things mysteriously happen, but she doesn't know how. When Ivy begins seeing a strange woman and a series of dead rabbits, she begins to investigate her mother's past.

Dana, Fee, and Marion begin dabbling in magic in their late teens and form a small coven. While Dana and Fee play innocently with magic, Marion becomes addicted to it. She seeks ways to make herself stronger and attempt more intense spells. When a ritual goes horribly wrong, Marion disappears and leaves Dana and Fee behind with intense guilt.

Years later, when Ivy begins to see this mysterious woman, Dana realizes her daughter is being drawn into the horrible mistake she made as a teenager. As the magic that has lain dormant begins to unfold, all of the women are thrown into a series of magical events that could change their lives forever.

Our Crooked Hearts is likely targeted to the upper YA crowd of ages 15-20. I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if I were within the intended age bracket. The story weaves itself together well but can be confusing with all of the perspective changes. If we knew at the beginning of each chapter who's POV we were coming from it would be much easier to follow. If you are looking for a more character-driven book, this one is not for you. There isn't much character development for anyone. This book is much more plot-driven. For a YA fantasy, it's actually pretty good. If you like witches, magic, and otherworldly phenomenon, you will probably really enjoy this story. There's also just a hint of romance if that's what you look for in a book. Overall, I would definitely recommend it for a quick, fun read.

I don't read books about witches and the occult, Too creepy for me! But Melissa Albert's novel is so well-written that it drew me into a story I would typically avoid. If you like dark fiction that grabs tight and won't let you go, this is the novel for you.

This was such a unique YA story. It was sharp, dark, and atmospheric. The writing was in-depth and even poetic at times. It read more like an adult fantasy novel even though the characters were YA.

I loved the main character, Ivy, and how her story unfolded as secrets and truths were revealed. This was told in two timelines and the past timeline focused on Ivy’s mom and her secrets.

My only complaint is that the ending seemed a bit rushed. There were a lot of reveals that could have been spaced out better to match the pacing of the rest of the book.

Overall this was such a strong YA fantasy book!