Don't go into The Hazel Woods

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert - a review.

Alice and her mother, Ella, receive word that Ella's mother, Althea Prosperpine, has died.   Until this note reached them, Ella and Alice found themselves beset with bad luck - fires, mold, weird messages written on walls.  They moved often and secretly, running, Alice thought, from her grandmother.

Althea Prosperpine was famous for writing one book, The Tales of the Hinterland.  Alice had only ever seen one copy of the book, owned by a red-haired man who took her for a ride when she was small.  The book of fairy tales had a rabid cult following - fans who hunted Ella and Alice down in hopes of reaching Althea. 

With Althea's death, Ella and Alice settled down.  Ella even married - a very rich man with a teenage daughter of his own.  It is here, in Manhattan that the story really begins.  Alice finds someone who has read the book, and who tells her the tales.  And the stories are dark, twisted and hopeless.

Then, Ella is kidnapped.  And characters from the book appear on city streets.  Alice will do anything and go anywhere to retrieve her mother - even to the Hazel Wood, Althea's estate.  This is the one place Ella told Alice never to go.

The first two thirds of the book read like a horror story.  Alice and Finch, the school mate who knows the stories, try to find Hazel Wood.  Finch recognizes the ghouls that appear in the city, and then later in upstate New York, from the book and tells their stories.  Despair deepens.

Alice is thrown into an alternate reality, a dream that may never end.  If you have those dreams, where you are chased and never get farther away, in which you turn corners and end up back where you started, dreams where everything is off kilter and you don't know why and your heart quickens and you step into something awful - if you have those dreams, think twice about reading this book.

However, if you love fairy tales, the light and the dark, if you are fascinated with how stories inform our concept of the world, well, turn on all the lights and keep reading.  Alice is on a journey of transformation and redemption and it's a wild ride.