Staff Pick
Creepy and suspenseful, The Hazel Wood is the story of Alice, her mother Ella, and a book of dark fairy tales that just might be true. When Ella disappears and characters from the stories begin to appear, Alice may find more than she bargained for. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Welcome to Melissa Albert's The Hazel Wood — the fiercely stunning New York Times bestseller with seven starred reviews everyone is raving about.
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.
Review
“Simultaneously wondrous and horrific, dreamlike and bloody, lyrical and creepy, exquisitely haunting and casually, brutally cruel. Not everybody lives, and certainly not ‘happily ever after’ — but within all the grisly darkness, Alice's fierce integrity and hard-won self-knowledge shine unquenched.” Kirkus (Starred Review)
Review
“One of those rare young adult fantasy novels that holds a self-contained world in only a few hundred pages.” Esquire
Review
“A can’t-miss, dark, and creepy new take on fairy tales that will have you glued to the page until the very end.” BuzzFeed
Review
“An eerie, assured first novel. Albert occasionally entwines the haunting tales of the grandmother’s book through this mesmerizing narrative, creating a fantasy as lush and twisty as ivy.” The Washington Post
Review
“An original and imaginative fairy tale: thrilling, fascinating, and poignant in equal measure. Grade: A-.” Entertainment Weekly, Best New Books
Review
“Insidiously beautiful, this is the opposite of escapist fantasy; it is a story about the imagination’s power to loose atrocity into the (mostly) law-abiding confines of the real.” The Guardian
Review
“The Hazel Wood starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth, and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a good book. It's a captivating debut.” The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Melissa Albert is the founding editor of the Barnes & Noble Teen Blog and the managing editor of BN.com. She has written for McSweeney’s, Time Out Chicago, MTV, and more. Melissa is from Illinois and lives in Brooklyn.