In most books, without-exception-sh*tty characters would be a dealbreaker. But not here, my dear boy! Au contraire, mon frère! They make up for it, almost, but not to the degree that I’d give it any more than 3.5 stars. Don't look for fairy tale endings in these stories. Every one of them is dark and creepy, but incredibly entertaining!! As all of this hit me, he was already standing up, grabbing his book off the table, and striding out of the café. Before the bells on the door stopped jingling, I was after him. Someone’s laptop cord crossed my path, and I nearly sent the thing flying; by the time I finished apologizing and wrenched open the door, the man was out of sight. I looked up and down the quiet sidewalk, my hands itching to hold a cigarette—my mom and I had quit when we moved in with Harold.

I will not list all the potential emotional triggers here, but will just say that the book contains plenty of gore and violence, although they're maybe slightly softened by the (naturally) unrealistic, fairy-tale quality of the stories, and few characters get a definitively positive ending. Her mother is stolen away - by a figure who claims to come from 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.The characters like Twice Killed Katherine, and Alice Three-Times, while they were powerful characters in the previous books, their origin stories here did fall flat and blur together at times, with every bride/girl seeming to be the same person rewritten.

Highly literary, occasionally surreal, and grounded by Alice’s clipped, matter-of-fact voice, The Hazel Wood is a dark story that readers will have trouble leaving behind.” — Booklist, starred review But there is a danger there as well, a danger which The Hazel Wood does not avoid completely. If we are so focused on the terrible parts of fairyland, we risk missing its beauty altogether. There is never a moment where we are allowed to look around the Hinterland and enjoy it. We don't get to wonder at its magics, or see any of its stories that have happy endings. And to me, that is the true power at the heart of fairy tales and beloved childhood fantasy books alike: They show us how to win against the dark. Don’t look now, but Guy in the Hat is here.” My coworker, Lana, breathed hot in my ear. Lana was a ceramicist in her second year at Pratt who looked like David Bowie’s even hotter sister and wore hideous clothes that looked good on her anyway. Today she was in a baggy orange Rebel Alliance–style jumpsuit. She smelled like Michelangelo must have—plaster dust and sweat. Somehow that looked good on her, too. I don’t think there’s anyone out there doing better work in the traditional dark fairy tale sub-genre at the moment than Albert, who hooked me with her world building with the first book set in this world and has continued to captivate me since.

What does hazel look like?

This is a must for fans of The Hazel Wood series but honestly? You could have disliked, or even not read, those books and still enjoy this. Thoroughly, creepily captivating, with surprises I never saw coming!' - Kristin Cashore, author of the Graceling Realm series In this brutal and beautiful world a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice - and still lives.

The main character in "The Hazel Wood" is also named Alice. She seeks out a terrifying and oddball place where logic is tied to story and story is a cold and relentless taskmaster. She is too old and broken to be resilient but she's on a quest, darn it. Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice―and still lives.

Select a format:

We tried to wait out a full school year in an LA guesthouse Ella rented from an earnest hippie with a trust fund, but four months in the woman’s husband started suffering from symptoms of chronic fatigue. After Ella moved to the main house to help out, the ceiling fell in over the master bedroom, and the hippie sleepwalked into the swimming pool. We didn’t want to start a death count, so we’d moved along. All the shenanigans and special-snowflake-ness of an unpopular opinion with none of the pain and full-on suffering of reading a bad book! I should do this more often. Fingers crossed. This is a book of fairytales (my favorite) that is full of darkness and blood and powerful girls and selfish girls and powerful girls and violence and anger and revenge and badassery (all of which are my other favorites). There was once a rich merchant who lived at the edge of the woods, in a tiny town in the Hinterland.' So it's not a witch who lives at the edge of the woods, it's a man - but we soon learn that his wife is 'strange', so there is a witch there, too, after all...

On the way to school the next day, Alice’s step-sister Aubrey tells Alice that Harold is planning to divorce Ella. At school, where Alice is one of the few students who is not a direct child of wealth, she attends drama class to see that Audrey has left. This means Alice is paired up with one of Althea’s biggest fans: Ellery Finch. Finch is one of the wealthiest people at the school who clearly has a crush on Alice. After class, he asks to see her again outside of class and Alice agrees despite being confused at how she feels about him. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Albert, Melissa. The Hazel Wood. Flatiron Books, 2018. Hardcover. Until recently hazel has received less conservation attention than some other tree species, but this is changing now that its importance has been recognised, particularly in the temperate rainforests of western Scotland. Hazel is important, however, in providing the main habitat for an ascomycete fungus ( Hypocreopsis rhododendri) which was only known from rhododendrons in North America until it was discovered on hazel in Mull in the 1970s, and then elsewhere in western Scotland. It mainly grows on standing dead stems of hazel, but also has been found on living branches. Because of its rarity in Britain, a Species Action Plan has been prepared for this fungus.

Dear Melissa Albert: Thank you for making this book (which I basically had the idea for - I mean, you mentioned it in a different book, but I am on the record as saying I would like it to be a real book before even you were, so), and thank you for making it everything I wanted it to be, and thank you for giving me a five star read against the odds. Hazel is a member of the birch family of trees, Betulaceae, and can grow to a height of 10 metres, although in Scotland it is usually no more than 6 metres tall. Typically it has a number of shoots or trunks branching out at, or just above, ground level, and this growth habit has led to some people referring to it as a bush rather than a tree, because it doesn’t meet the strict definition for a tree, of having a single stem that is unbranched near the ground.