2020 read #3: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert.

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
359 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 24 to January 31
Rating: 2 out of 5

I have a weakness for books with beautiful covers. Lush woods, striking imagery, more abstract compositions suggesting magic in the depths between the covers—I get hooked every time. This book’s cover, with its arcane objects arranged in gilt patterns to suggest infinity, earned it a spot in my must-read list the moment I saw it displayed in a chain bookseller. Further, the jacket flap summary alluded to a childhood spent growing up on the road, on the run from magical enmity. How could I resist something like that?

Unlike Albert, who mentions her own happy childhood in the acknowledgments, I really did grow up on the road, raised by a single parent. Unlike Ella Proserpine, who spirits her daughter Alice from place to place to stay one step ahead of supernatural stalkers out of fairy tales, my father shoved me into the car while he attempted to flee from his own schizophrenia. Magic and mental illness have been linked since the putative days of shamans, of course, so I really wanted to like this book, even if it did step on the toes of a story that should have been mine to tell.

Sadly, I don’t think I was the intended demographic for this story.

The vast “Young Adult fantasy” field of modern times, from what I’ve read and reviewed over the years, often seems directed less at current tweens and teens and more at the Millennials (now pushing 40 in some cases) who imprinted on Harry Potter as kids, and never stopped craving snack-food fantasy. YA fantasy today seems designed around a drive-thru menu of ass-kicking suprahuman action heroes like those you'd find in Marvel movies or pulp novels of yore, except not so numbingly straight, white, and male. This isn’t meant maliciously; I’d far rather chat books and hang out with someone who swears by The Invisible Library than someone who still reads Terry Goodkind or John Ringo in 2020. The Hazel Wood seems to run counter to this "YA is for thirtysomethings" trend: it seems to be a YA novel actually written for teens.

Alice, our narrator and hero, is an angry person. Everything and anything will set her off: people hindering her, people helping her, people trying to get to know her. But pretty much everyone around her is almost equally short with everyone else. It reminded me at times of one of my least favorite books, The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells. The narration is flippant and sarcastic and sometimes just flat-out bad, especially in its descriptions: "like someone sewing a sweater onto my skin at the speed of sound.” Or my favorite: "[the statues] glared impassively." How can anything, even a statue, glare impassively? Impassive and glaring are mutually exclusive.

The first two-thirds of The Hazel Wood is next door to unreadable, a journey narrative where the momentum gets killed every couple pages for the characters to try to talk and develop and spell out exposition, but then that too stalls as they get pissed at each other and fall into snarling instead. Deprived of any real development, every character aside from Alice feels more like a plot device than a person. If I had to pick one line from the book to summarize the experience of reading its first two hundred pages, it would be this: "He started to say something, but shrugged instead."

The last third of the book sees a slight improvement, suggesting far more interesting narratives than the one we just labored through, but even at its best, The Hazel Wood reads like a not very good imitation of Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland series. The ending is all right, again bringing to mind a much better book (Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway), but that isn't enough to save it or make the experience worthwhile.