The Hazel Wood

October 1, 2017

Gr 9 Up-Alice Proserpine's mother Ella was raised on fairy tales amid the cultlike fandom surrounding the release of Tales from the Hinterland, a collection of grim fairy tales that, in the 1980s, briefly made Alice's grandmother Althea Proserpine a celebrity. Instead of fairy tales, Alice has highways as she and her mother constantly move around hoping to outrun their eerie bad luck-something that seems much more likely when they learn that Althea has died alone on her estate known as The Hazel Wood. Everything isn't as it seems, and soon after, Alice's mother is kidnapped, leaving nothing except a warning for Alice to stay away from The Hazel Wood. The teen reluctantly enlists her classmate and not-so-secret Hinterland fan Ellery Finch, who may or may not have ulterior motives for helping, to share his expertise on the fairy tales. The path to the Hazel Wood leads Alice straight into the story of her family's mysterious past. Albert's standalone fantasy debut has a narration in the vein of a world-weary noir detective who happens to be a teenage girl. Resourceful, whip-smart, and incredibly impulsive, Alice also struggles with her barely contained rage as circumstances spiral out of her control. Her singular personality largely excuses the lack of context for much of her knowledge and cultural references that hearken more to a jaded adult than a modern teen. The lilting structure and deliberate tone bring to mind fairy tales both new and retold while also hinting at the teeth this story will bear in the form of murder, mayhem, and violence both in the Hinterland tales and in Alice's reality. VERDICT An aggressive lack of romance and characters transcending their plots make this story an empowering read that will be especially popular with fans of fairy-tale retellings.-Emma Carbone, Brooklyn Public Library

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2017
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 Hinterland--and the Stories that animate it--appear 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)

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Starred review from November 13, 2017
Alice Proserpine has grown up on the run, haunted by a book her mother, Ella, has forbidden her from reading: Tales from the Hinterland. It’s a collection of unsettling fairy tales written by a grandmother Alice has never met, a recluse with an obsessive fandom. Then Althea, the grandmother, dies, and Ella cryptically declares them free. Alice is focused on how they can turn their straw existence into a brick one after so many peripatetic years, and she’s bitterly disappointed with Ella’s solution: marry up. Shortly after, Ella goes missing, sending Alice and classmate Ellery Finch directly to the place Ella warned Alice to avoid: the Hazel Wood, Althea’s estate, where Alice painfully unravels the mystery of her childhood. Albert’s debut is rich with references to classic children’s literature; Alice’s sharp-edged narration and Althea’s terrifying fairy tales, interspersed throughout, build a tantalizing tale of secret histories and magic that carries costs and consequences. There is no happily-ever-after resolution except this: Alice’s hard-won right to be in charge of her own story. Ages 12–up. Agent: Faye Bender, Book Group.

March 1, 2018
Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother Ella have bounced from place to place, bad luck always rushing them on to somewhere new. Now it seems they're safe for a while, set up in Manhattan with a wealthy new husband for Ella. Then Ella is abducted, and Alice finally realizes where their perpetual bad luck has come from: the nasty fairy-tale world of her grandmother's cult-classic collection, Tales from the Hinterland. With the help of friend (and Hinterland fan) Ellery, Alice travels to the place her mother told her never to go?her grandmother's remote estate, the creepy Hazel Wood. As Alice fights to take control of her own story, this lengthy fantasy shifts from urbane realism to kaleidescopic dream world, a metafictional confection of fairy-tale tropes and nightmare. Can fairy-tale characters have lives independent of their stories? Is the world of stories a real place? Is fantasy reportage or invention? Albert plays with these questions in her fraught plot and hyper-focused imagery, and even more so through the plethora of cultural references woven throughout Alice's narrative: The Blind Assassin, Akata Witch, Howl's Moving Castle, David Bowie, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Violet Beauregarde, Ron Weasley. Sometimes buoyed, sometimes burdened by its abundant similes and metaphors, the novel always displays a strong, distinctive voice and ebullient love of language. deirdre f. baker

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