I love books about fairytales. Give me anything whimsical, magical and everything in between. I especially love books that not only have a fairytale vibe or are inspired by one of the classics but take the fairy tale idea and make it into something darker and perhaps even a little scary.
Melissa Albert’s 2018 debut novel, “The Hazel Wood,” attempts to do just that, but ultimately, this book reads more like a low-budget horror movie than a fairytale classic.
The story follows seventeen-year-old Alice, who has spent her life moving from place to place with her mother, who is seemingly in fear of staying in one place for too long. Alice always assumed that she and her mother were constantly moving to stay away from her grandmother, an eccentric old woman who is the author of a collection of dark fairytales called “The Hinterland” with a cult following.
But one day, her mother disappears and Alice’s world is turned upside down. She is forced to confront the weird fairytales that seem to follow her around to get to the bottom of her mother’s disappearance.
As I typed the description of what “The Hazel Wood” is about, I got even more frustrated with it because, conceptually, this book sounds absolutely amazing. It seemingly has everything I love: a woman protagonist, creepy fairytales, mystery and messy family lore, but every single one of these elements falls completely flat.
To be blunt, Alice is annoying. And boring. And “not like other girls.” Three strikes and you’re out of my good graces, Alice! Albert takes someone who could be such an interesting main character and gives her simultaneously little personality and makes her main trait “nasty sarcasm,” which I am definitely not a huge fan of.
The other major character, “The Hinterland” super fan Ellery, is more likable than Alice, but he is still not fleshed out well at all. On one page, he acts completely normal towards Alice, and on the next, he is aloof and standoffish. This would be okay if there was a well-written reason why he is this way, but there isn’t, so he just seems wishy-washy in the end.
The biggest disappointment for me, though, is the setting and execution of the fairytale vibes that the book promises. We basically don’t learn much about “The Hinterland” until the second half of the book.
So much of this book is just Ellery and Alice driving and walking around having disagreement after disagreement, and then suddenly, the second half just dives into unexplained fairytale weirdness that makes no sense. We keep hearing about these allusions to the “The Hinterland” without actually seeing this fairytale world, and the payoff in the end is just not enough to justify the slowness of this book’s narrative.
The book didn’t totally fall flat, though. The parts that were about “The Hinterland” were interesting, and there were small snippets of actual fairytales from Alice’s grandmother’s book, which were also highlights.
Considering this is a book that should check all of my boxes, “The Hazel Wood” was a major disappointment for me. There are so many other books that take this dark fairytale theme and do such a better job with it, so I highly suggest you read one of those instead.
