Her judgmental nature even borders on ableism when she meets a character who has been driven to a broken mental state by entering the Hazel Wood: Alice has several internal monologues about how little she trusts the woman's hygiene and the state of the woman's home's cleanliness, solely because she doesn't deem the woman 'sane enough'.Įven when she enlists the help of Finch, she is incessantly rude, critical, and offensive towards him. She shouts and snaps constantly, has no respect for anyone (besides her mother), and judges everyone she meets hyper-critically. As it progresses, she expresses actual, unwarranted physical violence towards other characters (including attempting to kill them via vehicular manslaughter because she feels guilty for her own poor choices). She starts the book off poorly, rambling about her anger issues without giving us any reason as to why she's talking about them. Let me put it this way: The Hazel Wood is my 200th read of 2017, and there have only been two narrators out of the entire other 199 titles that held a candle to how terrible Alice is. Before my brain could catch up, I jerked the wheel and turned the car off the road, sending us rattling toward the trees. And the shame of it boiled into something darker.

Anyone who knows my reading tastes knows I love flowery prose, but many of the descriptions in the fantasy 'half' of this book go far past flowery, straight through whimsical, and land smack-dab in nonsense. The story doesn't pick up as an actual fantasy tale until after the halfway mark, and when it does, the writing immediately becomes much less enjoyable. My first disappointment was in learning that the setting was modern-day New York, and the first half of the book straddled the line between contemporary and urban fantasy, at best. Marketing led me to believe that this was going to be the typical high fantasy world we see in fairytales.

I wanted that uncaring, 'here's your blood and guts and your fucked-up happy ending' fairy-tale voice.' Please remember that these are just my opinions! You are more than welcome to disagree or tell me your thoughts, but please do so respectfully. It was being marketed as a twisted fairytale, and those are my aesthetic for sure - the spookier and darker, the better - but this fell short in so many ways. It's time for another unpopular opinion review! This book was literally the single biggest reading disappointment of the year for me.

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert