Did I pick up this Book because I thought it might be another comp title? Yes. Was it? Kind of. Did I enjoy it? Mostly!
The Hazel Wood follows Alice as she is just trying to live her nomadic life with her mother. They are constantly moving around due to bad luck and she ends up marrying a rich man who is an asshole, as rich men always seem to be in these stories. Her estranged and now dead grandmother, Althea, was an author of a very rare book with a fanbase of obsessives. Or rather, everyone who gets their hands on the books becomes obsessed with them? One of those directions. When Ella’s mother gets kidnapped, Alice teams up with a fan to find her mother, given that the kidnappers have left the name Hinterland behind, which is the title of her grandmother’s book.
The whole thing is wrapped in fairy tales and the first half is steeped deep in the mystery of it, They aren’t the fairy tales that we grew up with, but they feel like they could have come from Grimm given how they are treated and interacted with. It’s interesting to have the feeling that you know what these stories are when only two are ever actually told in the book, and one of them I don’t think is actually told to completion.
I do have to make mention of Alice, because this will be a thing of contention, but I enjoyed watching her story and disliked her as a person. Alice is angry and self-centred, and that doesn’t stop by the end of the book. She has a reason behind it, but the reason is not really enough to excuse any of her actions in the story and I did actually like it. She’s kind of terrible and I have a thing for terrible characters that I feel I’m not supposed to relate to.
My issues come largely in the second half of the book. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but the second half felt rushed even though it wasn’t. I think it was supposed to read more like a traditional fairy tale, but it came across instead like the front half of the story was being shown and the back half was being told. There were too many elements that were brought in, too many new characters that didn’t have enough impact on the story to warrant being named, too many things about Alice herself that hadn’t been foreshadowed before. There was a lot that needed to be cut back or cut down in order to make the pacing of the latter half match the former, and to tighten up the narrative on the other side. The detour to show that the brother1 was helpful was largely unnecessary and could have been better woven in.
And now I’m going to talk about Ellery Finch.
So Finch. The only black character, who is black for exactly one scene in the story when they are talking to the cops and could be anything else throughout the rest of the book, He feels very much like a token character in that regard, and I don’t know if that was intentional, but it felt out of place. She kills him off at one point, but the landing doesn’t stick and he comes back, which feels strange given the context of the rest of the story. In a dark fairy tale world, the dead should really stay dead or it loses that atmosphere.The relationship between him and Alice was nice, but it never feels like it actually resolves at the end, and the redemption at the end feels hollow.
Still, I did enjoy the majority of the book. As I’m learning, I’m weirdly picky with narrative pacing and structure, and that’s much more on me than it is on the books.2 I did enjoy the read, even with the pacing problems at the end, and it was a lot of fun, especially with the new fairy tale concepts.
Read it now on Amazon!
- Who never gets a name despite him being plot relevant for some reason
- I’m also learning that I’m a horror writer!
