Reviews for The Hazel Wood

Horn Book
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

After seventeen-year-old Alice's mother is abducted, she realizes their perpetual bad luck comes from the nasty fairy-tale world of her grandmother's cult-classic collection, Tales from the Hinterland. With help from classmate Ellery, Alice travels to creepy Hazel Wood, her grandmother's remote estate. Shifting from urbane realism to a kaleidescopic, metafictional dream world of fairy-tale tropes and nightmare, the narrative always displays a distinctive voice and ebullient love of language. (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A ferocious young woman is drawn into her grandmother's sinister fairy-tale realm in this pitch-black fantasy debut.Once upon a time, Althea Proserpine achieved a cult celebrity with Tales from the Hinterland, a slim volume of dark, feminist fairy tales, but Alice has never met her reclusive grandmother nor visited her eponymous estate. Instead, she has spent her entire 17 years on the run from persistent bad luck, relying only on her mother, Ella. Now Althea is dead and Ella has been kidnapped, and the Hinterland seems determined to claim Alice as well. The Hinterlandand the Stories that animate itappear as simultaneously wondrous and horrific, dreamlike and bloody, lyrical and creepy, exquisitely haunting and casually, brutally cruel. White, petite, and princess-pretty Alice is a difficult heroine to like in her stormy (and frequently profane) narration, larded with pop-culture and children's-literature references and sprinkled with wry humor; her deceptive fragility conceals a scary toughness, icy hostility, and simmering rage. Despite her tentative friendship (and maybe more) with Ellery Finch, a wealthy biracial, brown-skinned geek for all things Althea Proserpine, any hints of romance are negligible compared to the powerful relationships among women: mothers and daughters, sisters and strangers, spinner and stories; ties of support and exploitation and love and liberation. 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. (Fantasy. 16-adult) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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