I was never much a fan of fairy tales, as a kid, but I love, love, love fairy tale retellings. I became obsessed with them in high school, tearing through piles of them – Ella Enchanted, Beauty, Wicked, pretty much anything ever written by Gail Carson Levine – and continued through college, devouring the Tangled series more times than I can count. So when I picked up The Hazel Wood and saw that it seemed to be, not a fairy tale retelling, exactly, but a new fairy tale set in our world, I was intrigued.
The mastery of a new fairy tale is something I found epitomized by books like La Mécanique du Coeur and The Night Circus. And while The Hazel Wood certainly boasts some of the atmospheric elements of both of these books, where it stumbles is in not committing to being either a new fairy tale or a retelling, but an odd combination of both.
The book begins as the story of Alice, daughter of Ella, granddaughter of Althea, a famed fairy tale writer who lives as a recluse. Alice and Ella have been on the run from Althea (and her fans) for years, and Alice has grown up obsessed with the grandmother she never knew and, above all, with the book she has never read. It is only once Ella is kidnapped that Alice begins her journey towards Althea.
I felt, as I was reading, that I actually had two books in my hand: one with almost a magical realism twist about a mother and daughter fleeing the legacy they have rejected, and another truly set in a fairy tale world. The seam between the two could have been managed with more deftness; instead, the book has two halves that are each beautiful and intriguing in their own right but, like broccoli-and-peppermint or chocolate-and-cheese, just never really seem to meld.