The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert | Review | 😒

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert follows a girl named Alice whose grandmother is famous for this book of fairy tales she wrote. Alice has never read the book, in fact it’s too hard to find. Her and her mother are constantly moving around until they learn that Althea, Alice’s mysterious grandmother, has died. They settle down in NY but soon realize that something is not right. Alice goes on an adventure with Finch, an Althea fan, to discover the truth of the Hazel Wood.

This book had a very promising premise. I absolutely love fairy tales (I’ve said it so many times), so I thought this book would be exactly my type.

The fairy tales themselves (the little blurbs we’re given) were probably my favorite part of the novel. They were interesting and not your average tale. I also really enjoyed how they were told in the actual story, like the reader wasn’t the only one hearing them for the first time.

The main character, Alice, was an okay character. I really enjoyed her story, but I didn’t really care about her otherwise. The other characters in the story were also just okay. None of them were really fleshed out.

The adventure aspect of the story to the Hazel Wood was really boring to me. It just took too long and nothing exciting or revealing really happened. When Alice finally gets to the Hazel Wood the novel turns a bit weird, which I’m okay with. It just wasn’t anything spectacular.

The ending was a bit more interesting than the rest of the story, but it was just so rushed after the slowness of the beginning. By the last page I was just a bit unsatisfied. My initial reaction to the novel as a whole was just “meh.”

Overall a pretty okay novel. I don’t really get the hype except for the love of the cover. It is beautiful.

Did you read The Hazel Wood? What did you think? (I think you can tell from the tone of my review just how underwhelmed I was.)