Review: The Hazel Wood

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3 Stars

Back in mid-2017 I saw first saw DRCs of The Hazel Wood go up and was intrigued. Then I saw and received a paper ARC and shared the photo on the blog's Facebook page because it was impossibly lush. I frankly don't know when I've seen such work go into a cover in a genre fiction ARC. And the cover was designed by someone who read enough of the book to capture so many elements of the story. Clearly, the publisher felt it was special. Reviews began to pour in and it was a love it or hate it affair. When my own blogging buddy, Alex (Alex Can Read), a professed lover of Alice in Wonderland stories, didn't find much to enjoy, I actually got worried about reading this book. And all the while I was puzzled. It looked like so much effort went into The Hazel Wood. Well, some of the effort was put in the wrong places, is my take. I think much of the criticism this book is taking in harsher reviews is about things that could have been improved by better editorial direction.

Some of what follows might be considered spoilery. Read at your peril or skip to the end!

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First, let me say that Melissa Albert is a writer with a great deal of promise. Her writing is easy to read. In fact, you easily keep reading, on and on, waiting for the real action to begin. And therein lies one of my first problems with this book- the pacing of the story. By the conclusion, I felt like I was reading in German, where all the verbs in a clause end up at the end of a sentence. Here the prelude to the Hinterland section seems to drag on and on, punctuated by the occasional weird and twisty invasion of Story. At the end of the book, the action is so fast that in the last 30 pages if you blink you miss something. This odd pacing made me feel as if I was either reading a story that should have been edited to novella length or should have been patiently built out to a fuller novel. And that leads me to some other observations.

One of the things that makes me confidently say that Melissa Albert is a good writer is that she has taken a sub-genre that has been popular- fairy tale retellings, of a sort- and which has been done quite well (especially relevant would be Story incursions such as those in Seanan McGuire's Indexing series) and still has managed to make her own mark. This is no small feat in the crowded arena of fairy tale-based stories. Much in the way that Seanan McGuire or (her alternate writer persona) Mira Grant have created their own fairy tale or nursery rhymes and woven them like fine-spun steel into a broader story (hence, stories within a story) Albert gives us her own dark Tales of the Hinterland with story titles and two detailed retellings, as recalled by Alice's friend Ellery Finch. But here's the problem with the execution of that idea. Occasionally, we see some characters who are noted to be from the Hinterland stories but they are often thin to the point of being two dimensional, and are all good or all bad or trying very hard to be edgy. (As Alex says, this whole book tries to be edgy.) And this is what I mean about patiently building out a fuller novel. I never felt the majority of the fairy tale characters were real characters, and precisely because of that fact, some of the twists of the novel became less real and therefore far more easily anticipated by the reader. 

In reading this book, I wanted to understand why and how Twice-Killed Katherine was killed twice and where her bird came from. I wanted more especially from the Alice-Three-Times storyline, for obvious reasons. We briefly meet but know nothing about Hansa. Who and where is Ilsa? And I wanted much, much more from the Story Spinner, her relationship with Althea Prosperpine, and how the interweaving of their stories created this story. I felt keenly that the Tales of the Hinterland that are the complete underpinning of The Hazel Wood were not yet written, or at the very least, they had not been written and polished into a fine and hallowed anthology of dark fairy tales that would inform every corner of this book. 

Alice, as the central character, was well-written for the purpose of the story. That her harsh coldness had a reason came as no surprise to any reader of Andersen's tales. Her relationship with Ella, her mother, and Audrey, her half-sister, were nicely drawn and written. The complete lack of discussion of who Alice's real father was an early tip-off to me that something was "wrong" in Alice's situation. I was bothered by the character development of Ellery Finch, who felt in some ways like a token, albeit conveniently wealthy, person of color. I even felt as if some scenes may have had to be rewritten in recognition of what the writer and editor got themselves into there. At times, much as I liked Finch, I felt there was a vein of inauthenticity about the character. It felt like there were awkward moments when his POC status was highlighted, instead of building out the character throughout the story. I wanted more from and about him. I wanted more realistic diversity in their NYC circle and in the Hinterland itself. Finch's relative abandonment by his neglectful and disinterested parents, which mirrored a series of abandonments of parental care that we see in The Hinterland was interesting and yet remained unexplored as one of the connection points between the two lead characters.

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First, let me say that Melissa Albert is a writer with a great deal of promise. Her writing is easy to read. In fact, you easily keep reading, on and on, waiting for the real action to begin. And therein lies one of my first problems with this book- the pacing of the story. By the conclusion, I felt like I was reading in German, where all the verbs in a clause end up at the end of a sentence. Here the prelude to the Hinterland section seems to drag on and on, punctuated by the occasional weird and twisty invasion of Story. At the end of the book, the action is so fast that in the last 30 pages if you blink you miss something. This odd pacing made me feel as if I was either reading a story that should have been edited to novella length or should have been patiently built out to a fuller novel. And that leads me to some other observations.

One of the things that makes me confidently say that Melissa Albert is a good writer is that she has taken a sub-genre that has been popular- fairy tale retellings, of a sort- and which has been done quite well (especially relevant would be Story incursions such as those in Seanan McGuire's Indexing series) and still has managed to make her own mark. This is no small feat in the crowded arena of fairy tale-based stories. Much in the way that Seanan McGuire or (her alternate writer persona) Mira Grant have created their own fairy tale or nursery rhymes and woven them like fine-spun steel into a broader story (hence, stories within a story) Albert gives us her own dark Tales of the Hinterland with story titles and two detailed retellings, as recalled by Alice's friend Ellery Finch. But here's the problem with the execution of that idea. Occasionally, we see some characters who are noted to be from the Hinterland stories but they are often thin to the point of being two dimensional, and are all good or all bad or trying very hard to be edgy. (As Alex says, this whole book tries to be edgy.) And this is what I mean about patiently building out a fuller novel. I never felt the majority of the fairy tale characters were real characters, and precisely because of that fact, some of the twists of the novel became less real and therefore far more easily anticipated by the reader.

In reading this book, I wanted to understand why and how Twice-Killed Katherine was killed twice and where her bird came from. I wanted more especially from the Alice-Three-Times storyline, for obvious reasons. We briefly meet but know nothing about Hansa. Who and where is Ilsa? And I wanted much, much more from the Story Spinner, her relationship with Althea Prosperpine, and how the interweaving of their stories created this story. I felt keenly that the Tales of the Hinterland that are the complete underpinning of The Hazel Wood were not yet written, or at the very least, they had not been written and polished into a fine and hallowed anthology of dark fairy tales that would inform every corner of this book.

Alice, as the central character, was well-written for the purpose of the story. That her harsh coldness had a reason came as no surprise to any reader of Andersen's tales. Her relationship with Ella, her mother, and Audrey, her half-sister, were nicely drawn and written. The complete lack of discussion of who Alice's father was an early tip-off to me that something was "wrong" in Alice's situation. I was bothered by the character development of Ellery Finch, who felt in some ways like a token, albeit conveniently wealthy, person of color. I even felt as if some scenes may have had to be rewritten in recognition of what the writer and editor got themselves into there. At times, much as I liked Finch, I felt there was a vein of inauthenticity about the character. It felt like there were awkward moments when his POC status was highlighted, instead of building out the character throughout the story. I wanted more from and about him. I wanted more realistic diversity in their NYC circle and in the Hinterland itself. Finch's relative abandonment by his neglectful and disinterested parents, which mirrored a series of abandonments of parental care that we see in The Hinterland was interesting and yet remained unexplored as one of the connection points between the two lead characters.

(hide spoiler)]

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All in all, I found things to enjoy in The Hazel Wood. I am looking forward to seeing what Melissa Albert does next, either in the sequel or in a novel set in a fresh world.


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