Introduction

Welcome to Melissa Albert's The Hazel Wood?the fiercely stunning New York Times bestseller with six starred reviews everyone is raving about!

Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: Her mother is stolen away?by a figure who claims to come from the Hinterland, the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother's stories are set. Alice's only lead is the message her mother left behind: “Stay away from the Hazel Wood.”

Alice has long steered clear of her grandmother’s cultish fans. But now she has no choice but to ally with classmate Ellery Finch, a Hinterland superfan who may have his own reasons for wanting to help her. To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother's tales began?and where she might find out how her own story went so wrong.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of February 2018: My favorite books, especially those that lurk in well-trod genres like young adult fantasy, are those tales that sink a grappling hook in your chest and drag you through a maze of plot twists and surprises until you're hollowed out and yet supremely satisfied at the final page. The Hazel Wood, a creepy, abrasive, and marvelous debut novel, does just that. Teenager Alice knows fairy tales aren't real, though they certainly have affected her own life: Decades ago her grandmother penned a slim volume of brutal fairy tales set in the fictional Hinterland and then promptly shut herself off from the world in her hidden estate. Alice and her mother have been on the road ever since, rarely staying in one place for more than a few months. But when Alice's mother disappears, taken by people who bear a nightmarish resemblance to the characters in her grandmother's stories, Alice turns to Hinterland superfan and sorta-friend Ellery Finch to help her track down her mother and her grandmother's long-lost estate. Alice blazes with a rage and a grace that spurs her and the reader through the weird and brambly paths that lead to the truth behind her grandmother's dark stories and Alice's own childhood. Mesmerizing and menacing, The Hazel Wood rings with a voice and an authenticity driven by a talented author who distills into storytelling magic the moments of power and helplessness spawned by the realization that the world is not as we imagined it to be. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review

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