Until Althea Proserpine (born Anna Parks) died all alone on the grand estate she’d named the Hazel Wood, my mother and I had spent our lives as bad luck guests. We moved at least twice a year and sometimes more, but the bad luck always found us.
When we traveled I kept an eagle eye on the cars behind us, like bad luck could take human form and trail you in a minivan. But bad luck was sneakier than that. You couldn’t outsmart it, you could only move along when it had you in its sights.
After Althea died, we stopped moving. Ella surprised me with a key to a place in Brooklyn, and we moved in with our pitiful store of stuff. The weeks ticked by, then the months. I remained vigilant, but our suitcases stayed under the bed. The light in our apartment was all the colors of metal— blinding platinum in the morning, gold in the afternoon, bronze from streetlights at night. I could watch the light roll and change over our walls for hours. It was mine.
Her voice was hard and certain. “No more bad luck for us, Alice. You hear me? It’s done.” So I went to public school. I hung Christmas lights around the plaster mantel behind our bed, and took a job at a café that turned into a bar when the sun went down. Ella started talking about things she’d never talked about before: painting our walls, buying a new sofa. College applications.
It was that last one that got us into trouble— Ella’s dream of a normal life for me, one with a future. Because if you’ve spent your whole life running, how do you learn to stand still? How do you figure out the right way to turn your straw house into brick?

Wow, I have been hearing so much about this book. From the first glimpse of the front cover and the snippet of a summary I saw, I knew that this book would be for me.
Dark fairytales?
Sign me up!
Alice is a relatable and not-entirely-likeable protagonist and we follow her attempts to get to the bottom of the weird things that have always happened around her. She and her mother have spent years fleeing the 'bad luck' and darkness that seems to dog their steps. When the grandmother Alice has never known dies on her hidden estate, The Hazel Wood, Alice's mother seems to think they can finally stop running...but things aren't so simple!
I really enjoyed all the references to various fairy tales and folklore throughout the book, as well as the insertions of sections of the stories published by Alice's grandmother after her adventures. Apart from this, the book was entirely different to what I was expecting. A lot of it takes place in our world, and despite strangeness leaking through into the real world we don't get to see the real magic in the Hinterlands until quite late.
At times this book was quite slow and I was impatient to get to the Hazel Wood. The build-up to this is done really well, then I felt like the last section was really rushed.
Dark and fascinating, but not a new favourite for me I'm afraid. Another book that promises magic, but doesn't have nearly enough of it until the end!

Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn’t have and secrets you kept or couldn’t and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed -together detritus that becomes what you call your life.
But every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, till all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads. I wrote down dates and places in the corners of my books, and lost them along the way. Maybe it was my mother whispering in my ear. The bad luck won’t follow us to the next place. You don’t have to remember it this way. Or maybe it was the clean break of it, the way we never looked back.
But I didn’t think so. I think it was just me. My mind was an old cassette tape that kept being recorded over. Only wavering ghost notes from the old music came through. I wondered, sometimes, what the original recording would sound like— what the source code of me might look like. I worried it was darker than I wanted it to be. I worried it didn’t exist at all. I was like a balloon tied to Ella’s wrist: If I didn’t have her to tell me who I was, remind me why it mattered, I might float away.


What I liked: The dark fairytales - I would have loved to read the book written by Alice's grandmother. The relationship between Alice and her mother. The genuine creepiness of the books going missing and the build-up to travelling to the Hazel Wood.

Even better if: I wish that the time in the Hazel Wood was longer. It was amazing, but felt like there was a lot in 'the real world' first and I really wanted to get into the world Althea recorded in her stories... Alice was quite unlikeable at times, particularly in how she treats Finch and dismisses him even when he's trying to help her. Found her fond feelings towards her kidnapper quite odd too.

How you could use it in your classroom: I wouldn't recommend this for a primary classroom, but would recommend this to older readers in secondary school, particularly if they have previously enjoyed some of the dark fairy tales by Holly Black or Melissa Marr. (Do be aware that there is swearing though!) I did like Alice's relationship with her mother and it could easily be used to start a discussion about home, family and belonging.

The Hazel Wood is a fairy tale with a twist, wholly original and definitely unputdownable.

The Hazel Wood begins with a Vanity Fair article from 1987 on reclusive author Althea Proserpine. The author states that Althea is raising her daughter on fairy tales. An intriguing first line.



“I ask if I can come talk to her in person, and her laugh is hot whiskey on ice. ‘You’d get lost on the way to finding me,’ she says. ‘You’d need breadcrumbs, or a spool of thread.’

The protagonist of The Hazel Wood is 17-year-old Alice Proserpine, granddaughter of Althea.

“My mother was raised on fairy tales, but I was raised on highways.”

Alice and her mother, Ella, moved about so much when Alice was younger and stayed with so many different people that she had no awareness of the stranger danger. At the age of six she climbed into a car with a red-headed man she had never met and let him drive her for fourteen hours before the police caught up with them. She had been fooled into getting into the car because he told her he knew her grandmother, but it turned out he was just an obsessive fan of her grandmother’s book.

Alice and her mother, Ella, have been plagued by bad luck for as long as Alice can remember. They have constantly moved about to try to outrun it but sometimes it always catches up with them. That all changes with the death of Alice's reclusive author grandmother, finally Ella says it is safe to stay in one place.

“Until Althea Proserpine died all alone on the grand estate she’d named the Hazel Wood, my mother and I had spent our lives as bad luck guests. We moved at least twice a year and sometimes more, but the bad luck always found us.”

Alice had never met Althea, but she used to frequently dream of meeting her and going to live with her. Ella tells Alice that Althea’s death means they are free and shortly after that they settle in an apartment in Brooklyn.

Alice gets a part-time job in a coffee shop and after a whirlwind romance Ella marries a rich man named Harold.

On day at work Alice is startled to see the redheaded man who kidnapped her in the coffee shop where she works. The only problem is he hasn’t aged at all in ten years and Alice knows if he is there then he is there for her. Before Alice can question him, he bolts but not before she realises he is was reading her grandmother’s book Tales From The Hinterland.

Alice was only ten when she first discovered a copy of her grandmother’s book and realised it was not just any book but a book full of fairy tales.

“I was already the kind of girl who closed my eyes and thumped the backs of furniture looking for hidden doors, and wished on second stars to the right whenever the night was dark enough to see them. Finding a green and book with a fairy tale name in the very bottom of an otherwise boring chest of drawers thrilled me.”

There were 12 stories in total in the book: The Door That Wasn’t There, Hansa The Traveller, The Clockwork Bride, Jenny And The Night Women, The Skinned Maiden, Alice-Three-Times, The House Under The Stairwell, Ilsa Waits, The Sea Cellar, The Mother And The Dagger, Twice-Killed Katherine, and Death And The Woodwife.

Naturally Alice was tempted by the story with her name in the title but before she could read more than the first line Ella interrupted her and told her the book was not for children. Ella had never restricted Alice from doing anything based on her age, so this ban intrigued Alice further. This and the haunting first line of the story.

“When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end, and the midwife didn’t stay long enough to wash her.”

No matter how hard she tried Alice could never find another copy of the book, so she took to obsessively reading anything she could about her grandmother. Until she was old enough to realise that maybe the reason she had never met Althea was because her grandmother wasn’t interested in meeting her.

Alice decides to wait to tell Ella about the man with the red hair because Ella has had a bad day.

The next day when Alice returns from school Ella has gone and there is no sign of Audrey or Harold in the apartment. There is a bad smell that lingers, and an envelope addressed to her with the title page from ‘Alice -Three – Times’ inside.

With nothing to go on and suspecting that all this is somehow connected to her grandmother’s book, Alice has nothing to go on and no knowledge of her grandmother’s book. In desperation she turns to classmate and superfan of her grandmother’s book Ellery Finch.

Unfortunately, Finch had his copy of Tales From The Hinterland stolen from him but he can remember some of the brilliantly eerie tales. Together they go to Harold’s apartment and are startled to hear that Ella has been taken by a group calling themselves ‘The Hinterland.’ Harold’s daughter Audrey also gives her a message from Ella to ‘stay the hell away from the Hazel Wood.’

Together Alice and Finch set out to find her grandmother’s estate the Hazel Wood in the hope that they will find some answers there.

I read some other reviews of The Hazel Wood prior to requesting this book and some of them were negative but I have to say I have no idea what they were on about. I loved this book and as soon as I finished it I wanted to read it again. The Hazel Wood is ideal for fans of Grimm fairytales.

I've given the book 3 stars, mostly because the first half of the book reads like an urban fantasy, a genre I have a soft spot for.

Firstly, the teenage characters are precocious and unrealistic, but so what? They are the characters that you wanted to be as a teenager, or dreamt of meeting and hanging out with. Alice and Finch are whip smart, overly cynical, rude, privileged teens living in NYC. They join up when Alice's mother is kidnapped and the solution to finding her seems to lie in her Grandmother's impossible to get hold of book and the cast of strange characters that are following her. There are some genuinely creepy moments and I adored the retelling of some of the gruesome tales from the book 'Tales from the Hinterland'.

It is when Alice enters the Hinterland that my interest and enjoyment started to wane. It almost felt as though a different author had written this part of the book and much of it felt quite formulaic and a bit of a let down after the great start. This part of the book seemed to sit much more in the YA genre, as though the author had been reminded this is who she is writing for.

Thanks go to the publishers and net galley for the advanced copy in return for an honest review.

Luckily for me, I was able to read this a couple of days before publication thanks to netgalley and I really loved it. Although the hype does kind of let it down, it was still such an amazing book. Any hype surrounding a book will always make it seem like it wasn’t worth it in my opinion. I love fairy tales so this twisted tale was definitely up my street. I went into it with the idea that the Tales of the Hinterland was so widely popular that everybody had read it, but that was not the case, in the book, it’s so hard to find which made it even more intriguing to be honest. But I would have liked both things to pan out and see what would have happened with it being so popular in our world.

10 out of 10 for the cover because it’s absolutely gorgeous.
4.25 out of 5 for the book.

For lovers of dark mysterious tales.

The Hazel Wood is the dark and gripping story of a fairytale gone horribly wrong. Alice, a teenager with a chip on her shoulder, has led a nomadic existence, moving restlessly from city to city with her mother Ella, always seemingly pursued by bad luck. Her grandmother, who she has never met, was the famous writer Althea Proserpine, author of a notorious but hard to find book of dark fairytales, Tales from the Hinterland. When Ella suddenly goes missing and Alice finds herself being stalked by not-quite-human pursuers, she is forced to accept that the Hinterland is more than a story and go in search of the truth.

This book is fast paced and richly detailed, and manages to explore the dark world of fairytales in a gritty and believable way. It’s beautifully written and deeply enjoyable.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Net Galley and the publishers.

would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for letting me read this weird adult fairy tale

and believe me it is weird...but compelling to read as you want to know the ending, and it plays with your mind...and sometimes its quite scary in places

This is a book I'd seen so much hype about, like it was one of those where I wanted to get access to it as soon as possible and was lucky enough that netgalley gave me an arc. I think for this it's a it's me kind of thing because I can see how well loved it it. I was so on this thinking it would be a high fantasy, when really we only got the fantasy aspect to it towards the end...3/4 of the way through maybe a bit sooner. It took me so long to read this, I just couldn't get into it. At times I felt like I was forcing myself to read it, I didn't like the main character at all so that put me off as well. I really do wish I had enjoyed this more than what I wanted and it's a shame.

I found this hard to get on with,. The story is good, it does run, but, for me, it didn’t have that frisson that caught my attention. Shame, as it is a good story.

Alice and her mother are always on the run because no matter where they go bad luck seems to find them. Her grandmother Althea is the author of a rather rare and mysterious collection of short fairy tales called Tales from the Hinterland. Alice hasn’t met her grandmother before as Althea turned into a recluse and resides at her estate The Hazel Wood. That is until Alice’s mother Ella gets kidnapped and her only clue is a piece of paper which reveals one of the tales from her grandmother’s book. She Teams up with her “friend” Ellory Finch a fan of the fairy tales who knows more about the stories, to find out where her mother is.

This book is very creepy and dark, however you don’t see that until halfway through the book. I found the beginning to be quite slow and repetitive, and struggled to form a connection with the main characters. Alice seemed very cold and rude towards anyone who took interest in her. It seems though that she would do a lot for her mother. Ellory Finch seemed really nice but i sensed he was after something else and felt like something was off. I can appreciate that fact that it wasn’t heavily based on a romance and more about family.

That saying I really enjoyed the short stories in the Tales Of The Hinterland that Ellory Finch retells and wish we could have seen more. I would love if Melissa Albert brings out a short collection of stories based on them.

My rating for The Hazel Wood is 3 out of 5 stars

The Hazel Wood is a dark fables driven fantasy that evilly makes its readers pleasantly suffer the secret it withholds.

The story starts off with Alice and her mother, Ella, who have always been on the road to anywhere away from the bad luck that seems to keep following them. When one day, they receive a letter claiming Althea's—Alice's grandmother—death. Suddenly, everything appears to be falling in place: Ella falls in love with a rich businessman and both, her and Alice, shift to his high-end residence, Alice gets admitted to a school where only the rich kids usually go to, and she has a job like any other normal teenager would. But things weren't as good as they looked—Alice comes across the guy who had once kidnapped her when she was a little girl and runs off home, only to find her mother missing. Taken by the Hinterland.

I might be one of those who hasn't devoured every other fantasy (I'm a fan but it's still not the first on my list) so this concept intrigued me so much. Fairy tales are my favorite and creatively crafted ones that doesn't hint a happily-ever-after at all, is all the more interesting. 2018 is probably the year for dark perspectives being brought into the spotlight and this debut nails the growing trend. The plot is perfectly planned with all possible pessimistic probabilities (I swear I didn't say this solely for the alliteration) and so much so that even the slightest happy thing makes your ears (eyes in this case) perked up for what might be lying ahead.

Alice had grown up with questions that Ella never answered and her curiosity peaked up even more when she came across a magazine article about The Hazel Wood—her grandmother's multi-dollar estate. A relative she hadn't heard about from Ella because she always refused to speak of her, Althea had always been a far-off star she wanted to touch. So despite of fair warnings to stay away from The Hazel Wood, Alice still takes off to this place because she hopes to get her answers—or her mother's whereabouts—here.

I loved Alice. She is sort of rude, appears to be arrogant at times, gets super furious, and often comes across as expressionless, but the thing here is: she does all that involuntarily; it's her personality traits and have a justification that I would stray away from stating because this review is meant to be spoiler-free. As an expressing-limited-number-of-expressions kinda person myself I could relate to those little things that were meant to be funny (or not, I'm not sure!). Basically, she was a really good character for me that I felt grow up from a confused little teenager to a stronger daughter.

Speaking of that, I also loved the whole mother-daughter relationship portrayal. Ella isn't one of the usual moms but she's nothing less when it comes to protecting and loving her child. Alice isn't any usual either but again, she's willing to got to ends for her mother and that's about what every daughter would be ready to, too. Ella worked as a really good side character that came alive through Alice's memories and past experiences.

While I'm at it, I'll also mention how good of a person Finch was! He's been a fan of Althea's dark fairy tales collection forever and when Alice's connection to her comes to his notice, he doesn't even blink his eye before deciding to tag along with her to The Hazel Wood. He's the smarter person because of his prior knowledge about the Tales of Hinterland which makes him important. He isn't a love interest, far from it; he's a partner in act who gives way to sequences and doesn't simply follow around the main character. His role takes turns at all the right places that you should read to find out because (yeah, I know, I'm being monotonous with this excuse) this is meant to be spoiler-free. All in all, each and every character had a huge impact on the main story line.

Coming on to the writing. I loved it...like everything else about this book! It's lyrical, perfectly-paced, descriptively balanced, and just a pleasure to read. The narration is a first-person viewpoint of Alice and works tremendously to bring that expressionless soul to life. While Alice, out of all, is the most illiterate in terms of her knowledge about The Hazel Wood or the Tales of Hinterland, she doesn't confuse or frustrate the readers because the writing does its job well enough to give exactly what it wants to and at exactly what time. Overall, this is going to be on my fave list and I can't be more excited about the sequel!

I would recommend this to all those who love a good evil fantasy that draws you into a fairy tale land that you would rather stay away from. No, but in all seriousness, this is perfect for the magical, fantasy fans who are always pleasantly surprised by a folklore that hangs in a dark world.

A mother and daughter spend their lives on the run from 'bad stuff' that always seems to be following them. This may or may not have something to do with grandma and a book of dark, creepy fairy tales she wrote years ago.

This is a really original fantasy story. A little slow at times but overall a good read and not too angsty for a young adult book. The main character/narrator is very likeable though a bit bratty at times, but there may be a good reason for that....

I would certainly read the sequel.

I wanted to read The Hazel Wood as I'd gotten a bit bored with my usual crime/thriller genre.and wanted to try something a bit different. It definitely was..
Alice Proserpine is a teenage girl living with her beloved mother Ella. They move around a lot, never staying in one place for long as bad luck seems to follow them everywhere. Alice loves to read and is really into fairy tales. Her Grandmother, Althea Proserpine, wrote a very successful book called Tales Of The Hinterland, but Alice has never been allowed to read it and it's so rare now that it's impossible to find a copy anywhere, She's never met her Grandmother. All she knows is that after becoming famous with the book she became a recluse in a big house in The Hazel Wood. All the secrecy about it all just makes it more fascinating for Alice, Her Mother refuses to talk about it, but she meets a boy at school, Finch, who is a huge fan of the book. and they become friends..
Then strange things start to happen, These strange looking and smelling people keep turning up at her school and the coffee shop that she works in. And then she gets home from school one day and her mother is missing, and that strange smell is in their house. Finch is the only person she can go to for help. When Alice describes the strange people Finch hears striking similarities to characters from the book her Grandmother wrote. They believe her Mother has been kidnapped and taken to The Hazel Wood, so off they go to try and find her. What they find is a portal between Earth and The Hinterland where magical beings from fairy tales can come between the two worlds. They have to find their way from Earth and into the Halfway Forest before they can get to The Hazel Wood. Nothing makes sense here. Time doesn't exist, tree's can talk and there's stories unfolding in front of them. But Hinterland stories aren't nice children's tales, They are scary ones. Will Alice find her mother and the truth?
I really enjoyed learning about Alice and her relationship with Finch as they travel looking for Ella. It all got a bit weird when they get into the Hinterland though. It was a bit like the author had dropped some acid and written about all the hallucinations she'd had. Although I don't think fantasy books are really for me I can really appreciate how well this book was written and marvel at the imagination of the author. For anyone that enjoys fantasy I highly recommend this book.

When you think of fairy tales it is often woods, wolves, castles, princes and princesses with a happy ever after.  The Hazel Wood is nothing like that, it contains fairy tales but they are darker with an underlying feeling of dread to them.  Reclusive and mysterious author Althea Prosperine published her only novel Tales of the Hinterland.  Her granddaughter Ella has never met Althea, never read the book, but is aware of it.  In fact not many have met Althea of even have a copy of the book.  Ella and her mumAlice, move around a lot, keeping their heads down, always trying to keep ahead of the bad luck that seems to shadow them.  This story is how Ella learns about The Hazel Wood, the book and the bad luck.

This is a brilliantly woven story using the basic premise of a fairy tales and twisting them into a dark and brooding journey as we follow Ella and Alice.  There are things that are seen out of the corner of Ella's eye that gives feelings of supernatural, with mysterious darker undertones, shadows that linger people that don't quite fit in their environments all adding to a feeling of tense suspense.  As the story unfolds there are several twists that I didn't expect, they are clever and make this an extremely addictive read. There are several characters in this story and they are easily remembered and play their parts well, they have good backstories, and while I didn't like all the characters I found them intriguing.

Once I started this story I could not put it down, the descriptions give a vivid and imaginative picture.  I loved the style of the writing, at times it had the fairy tale feel you would expect, but also a darker much more intense feel that was far removed from fairy tales.  I would like to see follow on from this book, there were several characters that I would like to know more about, and some that left me with questions. But overall it has been beautifully put together and is one I would absolutely recommend.

So if you like a dark and twisty fantasy read that has some roots in magical fairy tales then this is a book for you.  It is a young adult read, that an older adult loved.

Brilliant. Magical. This is a grown up fairytale. It is different from anything I have ever read. I got totally caught up in a dark magical world. Alice's adventures are very well written and are definitely worth reading.

A beautiful surprise.

Alice and her mother have been on the move ever since she can remember, trying to outrun bad luck and fans of her reclusive grandmother’s cult book of fairy tales: Tales from the Hinterland. However, when Alice’s mother is kidnapped Alice must team up with a fan from her new school to do the only thing her mother has left a note telling her not to do – go to the Hazel Wood, her grandmother’s estate in the Hinterland, where all the fairy tales are set.

I really loved this one. First up, Albert’s prose is beautiful. It’s almost distractingly beautiful, because each line feels so polished that you sit with it for a while before continuing. The writing is also so consistently lovely throughout that it feels covered in it. No one line can stand out because they all stand out. My kindle ARC copy is insanely highlighted. I couldn’t help myself whenever I found a nice sentence or turn of phrase, but there were so many it’s useless to search through now.

I liked Alice as a protagonist her voice was good and I liked her seething rage as a point of difference. But it’s the world, characters and stories that make this special. It’s a big ask for a writer to create a whole new set of fairy tales (good ones!), characters and a world for them to live in. Albert manages it wonderfully. I loved how full the world felt, how all of the characters felt familiar and yet new. Albert nails the narrative tone required for the fairy tales themselves, too. They’re all dark, beautiful and brilliantly new.

I’ve seen some criticism that this is a retelling of another famous fairy tale but, perhaps due to a lack of familiarity with the original, I didn’t see it. Or, at least, what I did see I didn’t find off-putting.

My one point of criticism is that there is a distinct tone shift between the first and second halves of the novel. The second half, in comparison to the first, feels less grounded. It feels like it skims through the material both in time spent and depth. Because of this skimming nature, too, it comes across as a bit ‘tell-y’ rather than lived alongside Alice as the first part was. A lot is packed into the second half, but sometimes I didn’t feel the emotional impact of it because there wasn’t really much time for it to build and then hit.

Now, I think in light of the meta-themes being played with there’s an argument to be made here that this shift is a deliberate narrative choice. A shift between worlds. A shift between story types. A shift between experiences.

And that isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the second half. I loved the material there, too. In terms of plot and story elements the second half is where it’s at. But, I felt it started quite late and was over quite fast. I would have preferred the balance a bit more evenly distributed.

It’s also strangely YA. I say strangely, because it’s being presented as YA, but it didn’t feel particularly YA-ish to me. The YA themes are there if you look, but are not crazy apparent. I think this is one of those YA books likely to have a good deal of crossover appeal by virtue of not being too young in tone or teen-life focused.

I noticed that there’s both a second book planned for this series and a tie-in series of shorts (likely fairy tales) and I’m ready for it. This novel is great on its own, but the world of the Hinterland has a lot more to give than was covered in Alice’s story. We only got a few of the potential original tales here and the ramifications of the ending here are fascinating.

I hope we see a lot more from Albert. This is a strong debut, worthy of the amount of hype it’s being given.

It’s not going to be everyone’s book. Not only because of the mixed reviews, but just because some people’s tastes aren’t going to run to the story being told here and the fairy tale-esque nature of it. I can see that. But it really worked for me.

An advance copy of this book was kindly provided by Penguin Random House UK Children’s and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What little girl wouldn’t want to be named after a fairy tale? We all loved fairy tales as a child. They are myths and legends which have been retold so many times they become part of the collective consciousness. But you just need to look at the original Brothers Grimm to know that most fairy tales do not have a happy ending.

The Hazel Wood is one of those fairy tales. It’s not a “faerie” novel though - half of the book takes place in present day New York City, and Alice is a very modern protagonist. Even if you don’t normally read fantasy, or you think you’d never pick up a YA novel, I would recommend this book. It’s dark, it’s creepy, and when I finished it made me want to turn back to the start and read it all over again.

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review)

I absolutely inhaled this book! I didn't even realise I needed a skewed, vicious and modern fairytale in my life until I began this.

The descriptions were unbelievably vivid and each new location was a treat to discover. There were eerie undercurrents at every major moment for the reader to be reminded they were not reading a 'happily ever after' tale; the Hinterland simply does not do compassion or kindness. And why should it, if it lends such an dark and thrilling tone that entices you to read on?

I loved the narrative voice and how caught up Alice became in each moment. Also - I genuinely wish I could get a hold of the obscure collection of stories from the novel!

A great and twisted adventure that I will definitely be recommending. :)

I received a free advanced e-copy from Penguin and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Hazel Wood is book 1 in the series.

Firstly, I absolutely loved the cover and thought the blurb was very interesting, which made me request this book!

It took me a while to get into it... And I did not enjoy it as much as I thought I was going to. I did not like any of the characters. The start of the book was just too long. There were a lot of metaphors and descriptions, some which did not even seem to make sense.

Overall, the creep factor was well done and the idea of stories and other worlds was good, but it didn't meet my expectations and I just did not enjoy it.

From what I see, people either love it or hate it. Unfortunately, I'm on the dark side. I really was eagerly waiting for this book release, and the cover is so nice! I think there's a big problem at how this book is marketed as well. You expect a YA fantasy book when you enter it, then wait, wait, and wait for it. It doesn't come for more than half of the book. Maybe if the expectation is set right, then disappointment will be less.

Plot is very slow. On top, not liking the main character doesn't really help. Alice comes out as a very annoying, selfish, rude character. It's very hard to love a book, when you don't like or care about what the main character is going through.
Overall, the writing is nice. Unfortunately, the writer didn't complete it with a captivating character, or interesting enough idea. At times, it was confusing.
Maybe, it was not the book for me, but it was a highly anticipated book that ended with unmet expectations.

I like a grim(m) fairy-tale retelling as much as the next person, and a dark, modern re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland sounds fab, does it not? And yes, for the first third of The Hazel Wood, I was excited. Engrossed, even.
The premise is mysterious and enticing: Alice, our teenage protagonist, has been moving from place to place her entire life, her mum her only constant. She's never really known why her mum keeps packing them off different places, but best she can tell it's to escape the vicious "bad luck" they can't help but encounter.

There's something creepy about the bad luck that follows Alice and her mother, something eerie and supernatural, something that may be connected to Alice's grandmother Althea: the enigmatic author of an out-of-print collection of dark fairy-tales. But when Althea passes away alone in her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice's bad luck magnifies. Her mother is kidnapped 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 leaves behind: “Stay away from the Hazel Wood.”

The bait was set, I was immediately reeled in. The story was set up so well, I appreciated the colloquial and humorous writing style with a touch of poignancy. I really enjoyed Alice, not your typical protagonist. She had a tough upbringing, and she's riddled with anger issues and a smoking habit to boot. Yeah she's not entirely fond of life, but she doesn't sit around feeling sorry for herself. She's angry, sure, but she felt rounded and real. I'm not the kind of person who needs a protagonist to be "likeable" in order to like them, so Alice, with a bit of a temper, seemed fab. I eased into the story, desperate for answers to the mysteries surrounding the Hazel Wood.

Wow, did I wait for those.

Look, mystery is a great plot device and I'm all for it. But you can't take the piss. You can't string it out for over half the book without giving us anything! I didn't find the plot slow, there was more than enough going on, but honestly most of that was mere teasing. For more than half of the book, mysterious and creepy stuff just keeps happening. More and more questions start to appear. Do we get any answers? Nah. And that's just plain annoying. And what am I going to do when I don't get any hints and I've started to get irritated? I start noticing the flaws.

I didn't appreciate running around with these characters for 200-odd pages, being teased, and really not seeing any character growth. Alice, who I liked initially, got dull. She seemed promising, but showed her true colours in the end: two-dimensional and ultimately uninteresting. I like an alternative, kinda-dicky character, but you've got to give them depth. The only other memorable character was Alice's sidekick Finch, who was so boring I've got nothing else to say about him. It was such a shame. It started off with such promise!

But then, eventually, the answers started appearing. And for the time it took them, they could have been better. I'm not knocking them: the denouement and climax of the story were entirely reasonable, but by this point I had stopped caring.
My fantasy of an epic, dark Alice in Wonderland retelling? Where was that? Sure, Alice ends up in the Hinterland, which is otherworldly and strange, but it is not even remotely reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's airy, Dadaist masterpiece of nonsense. The closest thing The Hazel Wood resembles is Eastern European folklore, but even then that's a bit of a stretch. The most enjoyable and recognizable attempt at recreating the genre were two short chapters which were stories from Tales from the Hinterland, Althea's book. They were fabulous, I'd take more of those in a heartbeat. But we only got two (the relevant ones), and they were dispersed in weird places throughout the main plot, distracting from the story and immediately taking my mind out of the world. Ideally what we could have done with were lots of really condensed versions of the story scattered evenly throughout the novel between chapters. I'd have enjoyed that a whole lot more.

At the end of the day, this isn't just a one-star novel for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the beginning, I did like Melissa Albert's fairy-tales, and I think the overall plot arc was decent. But I really feel a lot more work could have been put into the execution. I needed characters with more depth, a less drawn-out mystery, and honestly what was that whole "white privilege" scene about?!

If you're looking for an eerie fairy-tale retelling or something with that kind of vibe, there's a few books I'd recommend above this one. Drown by Esther Dalseno and Cuckoo Song by Francis Hardinge spring to mind.
It looks like Melissa Albert is set to release the actual Tales from the Hinterland in a few years as a collection of her fairy-tales, which is definitely something I'd look out for. But as for
The Hazel Wood, I feel this tale should be left in the Hinterland where it belongs.