How are fairy tales really supposed to be? The Hazel Wood / The Night Country

A few years ago, I was wondering around Barnes & Noble and saw the most beautiful book cover I'd ever seen. It stuck in my brain for a long time. The next time I was wandering around in B&N (because let's be honest, we all love to browse), I saw it again. I picked it up, read the inside flap and put it down, but it still stuck with me. It wasn't until I listened to a podcast episode of What Should I Read Next where it was mentioned that I decided I was going to buy it. This is how The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert came in to my life. I bought it, it sat on my bookshelf for a year, and I picked it up two weeks ago and burned through it. Imagine my surprise and actual delight when I found that the second book, The Night Country, had come out earlier this year. I promptly ordered it and read it last week. It also has a striking cover that I can get lost in.

When I bought The Hazel Wood, I had a hunch that I would love it. But if you're anything like me, those hunches are scary because you want to love that book so much, you're afraid to read it lest it let you down. That's why it sat on my shelf for a year before I picked it up...but boy, am I glad I did. With the quarantine in effect these days, I have a lot more time to read. I love it, because I do not consider myself a fast reader. When I read I have to have complete silence or white noise, so finding optimum reading conditions is key. Well, none of that mattered with these books. They sucked me in and kept me so enthralled that I didn't hear anything else.

I understand that most of my posts are fan-girl moments. That is because I only write about books I really enjoyed, and enjoyed enough to recommend to people. If you like fairy tales, if you like creepy things, if you like forlorn romance and bad luck and everything falling into place, you might like these books. The premise of The Hazel Wood is this: Alice's grandmother is Althea Proserpine, and she wrote a creepy AF storybook. Alice and her mother, Ella, live a vagabond life. They hop from place to place, because if they stay put too long, weird shit happens. The finally find a good spot, and Alice meets Finch (I LOVED THIS KID). Finch helps Alice navigate a bunch of sticky situations. There's infatuation, there's danger, there's magic and fairy tales, and then, there's a lot of "nothing going right."

This book left me gutted at the end. I really felt like even though the story is obviously fictional (I mean, magic) it kind of ended on a realistic note. Meaning that not everyone won in the end. Not everyone is loved. Not everyone is okay. I feel that a lot of the time writers feel like they have to make the end worth the reading of the whole novel and the way they do that is "happily ever after." I appreciated that this time, the author didn't do that. Sure, it ends on a somewhat hopeful note, but my heart was still broken. I felt that Melissa Albert's follow up with the Night Country was a perfect ending to this story, but I can't tell you much about the second book without giving away the first one, so...

Now, I can't sit here and say this is a literary masterpiece because what even is a literary masterpiece? BUT, what I can say is that I so truly enjoyed this story that I gave it a pretty high star rating. I don't ever discuss my personal star ratings because I seem to have some sort of block there - I don't hardly ever rate on goodreads - but this time I can say that the entertainment value of these books pleased me to more stars than normal. It's interesting to me, too, because a readerly friend of mine read The Hazel Wood and didn't like it. She said it didn't click with her. It's so neat to think that every reading experience is unique to the person with the eyes on the paper, that a book I loved wasn't her cup of tea. So keep that in mind when you read the fan-girl gush above: just because I loved it, doesn't mean you will. And that's A-Okay. For this girl, though...it was worth the wait to read. I truly enjoyed these books. I can't wait for her next one. And it's sent me down an internet spiral to the true origins of the fairy tales we know and love today. Ya'll...fairy tales are C R E E P Y & I N A P P R O P R I A T E. It's definitely not a shocker to me that they've been altered for children these days. But I'm a grown woman, and I'll read about death and destruction and unrequited/deadly love if I want to.

Thanks for sticking this one out, guys. I may start to try and do more in-depth and analytical responses to books soon since I'm reading more classics this year, so keep your eyes peeled for those.

xoxo