The Hazel Wood

So this book was one of those that seemed to pop up out of nowhere on the New York Times Bestseller’s List and while it seemed interesting, it also seemed to belong to the hackneyed trope of flipped fairytales and upturned classic stories that are usually more hit-n-miss than a bullseye.

Melissa Albert, while seemingly a prolific author, is also actually quite a beautiful writer. Her words are often rhythmic and have a poetic cadence to the lilt and lift of her words that made reading at first very enjoyable.

It personified the fairytale story she was writing and brought it to life using her own words and the pages of her book. However, this got old faster than Alice’s mom went missing.

At first her metaphors and imagery and metaphysical stories were lovely and fantastical, but they became trite and overused before even the halfway mark through the novel. Secondly, her stories within the story to me were more aggravating than creative.

Again, maybe at first it seemed ingenious, but very quickly I found myself shutting the book and putting it down for a few days whenever a segment of Tales of the Hinterland by Althea Proserpine popped up.

Additionally, the book was just odd. I get that Albert was going for the whole whimsical and nonsensical aspect that cult lovers of Alice in Wonderland still adore to this day, but the book hardly made any sense towards the end. Instead of reading as a fairytale it came across more like the mad scribblings of a bad drug trip.

And the main protagonists of the novel are forgettable. The main girl, Alice, has intense anger management issues and a penchant for trouble. The supposed love interest, Finch, seems too good to be real (a premonition that certainly comes true) and their relationship is as stable as a bowl of gelatin in an earthquake.

The end, specifically, really grated on me as they don’t even end up together. Finch stays in the rather fucked up world of the Hinterland just because his life back home in New York sucks a rich boy and Alice breaks her curse and just…leaves. The ending was precarious and sporadic and I realize that not every love interest is going to work out in real life, but this is YA and I deserve the romance and undying love that doesn’t exist in real life.

Recommendation: In the end, I would not recommend The Hazel Wood to anyone unless you were a fairytale freak and a Once Upon A time extreme fanatic. It’s just too confusing, too disappointing, and too much of a letdown in the end.

Score: 4/10