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The Hazel Wood: 1

The Hazel Wood: 1

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There was once a rich merchant who lived at the edge of the woods, in a tiny town in the Hinterland.' So it's not a witch who lives at the edge of the woods, it's a man - but we soon learn that his wife is 'strange', so there is a witch there, too, after all... If this scenario all seems a little wearisome, this is actually the boring bit, so reader take heart and press on! The most interesting section of the novel is when Alice actually ‘steps through the looking glass’ and arrives at Halfway Wood in her quest to find her missing mother – though more vital is the need for her to visit The Hazel Wood, the decayed estate of Althea, Alice’s legendary grandmother. These are not just places, they are part of HINTERLAND, more to the point Tales From The Hinterland which was the title of Althea’s collection of grim (or should it be grimm) short stories. Hinterland is a culture, its inhabitants speak in a ‘Hinterlandy’accent, they sometimes have violent traits. Hinterland has the power to defy time, it slows it down, it can kidnap and kill. Folk Alice encounters there are either ‘story,’ ’ex-story,’ or ‘refugee,’ and here is a spoiler; Alice is ‘story’, she’s ‘Alice-Three-Times’, the ice-inflicted ‘heroine’ of one of the tales of dread. This is a collection of fairy tales with more or less traditional themes (hero's quest, magic marriage, travels to the otherworld etc), inverted with a vengeance. Here is the first sentence of the first story, for instance: I don’t recall any noteworthy woman-to-woman interactions. Sisters exist, but only as plot devices, their deaths used as motivation to spur the heroines forward. The heroines seldom have female friends, and their relationships with their mothers are frosty at best (see above). Yes, the main character of this whole shindig. We do indeed spend the lion’s share of our time in her head. It’s not a buttered-popcorn-flavored jellybean level of unpleasant, but it’s not awesome.

From the blurb, this story showed so much promise. However, I feel like it over promised and under delivered. It's not often I'll say it about a book I've finished, but it let me down ... with a thump. If you have enjoyed things like Leigh Bardugo's The Language of Thorns, this is along the same vein. They are told like fairytales, but not the happy, romantic, Disney type. They are dark and gritty- think the original Grimms brothers.

The Celts equated hazelnuts with concentrated wisdom and poetic inspiration, as is suggested by the similarity between the Gaelic word for these nuts, cno, and the word for wisdom, cnocach.

Collections of stories that exist in other novels seem to be gathering popularity lately, and in this case, I think it really works. I was dying to read these all through the Hazel Wood duology, and in a rare turn of events, I think I like them a bit more than the actual novels. They’re dark and deliciously creepy, sometimes with a grim, fairytale-like moral and sometimes not, and while I liked some more than others, I never found my attention wandering in any of them. It’s almost perfectly paced, with none of the stories being ridiculously longer than the others, and I appreciate Albert keeping them short and sweet. (Or, er, short and bloody, as the case may be.) I’m not very moved by the illustrations or the overall color scheme (green and orange aren’t a great combination), but I enjoyed the overall aesthetics of the book. It felt like I was holding something just a little bit magical. The main character in "The Hazel Wood" is also named Alice. She seeks out a terrifying and oddball place where logic is tied to story and story is a cold and relentless taskmaster. She is too old and broken to be resilient but she's on a quest, darn it. When she was gone, I poured cold coffee on the trash can fire and pulled out the wet letter. Parts of it were eaten into ash, but I flattened the soggy remainder against my knees. The type was as dense and oddly spaced as the text on an old telegram. Many of these girls are well-off or royalty, and if they become brides (they usually do at some point), they are often unwilling.

The growth of successive new stems leads to the formation of a large base, or stool, which can be up to 2 metres in diameter, and in this way coppiced hazels can live for several hundred years. As all of this hit me, he was already standing up, grabbing his book off the table, and striding out of the café. Before the bells on the door stopped jingling, I was after him. Someone’s laptop cord crossed my path, and I nearly sent the thing flying; by the time I finished apologizing and wrenched open the door, the man was out of sight. I looked up and down the quiet sidewalk, my hands itching to hold a cigarette—my mom and I had quit when we moved in with Harold.

The Hazel Wood is still remarkable storytelling though! It’s a dark, twisted tale that will keep you guessing at everyone’s intentions. For we already know not to trust the people within fairy tales, but in reality it’s harder to tell who’s trustworthy and who’s not. If Melissa were to ever do a bonus addition that let us read these mystical Tales from the Hinterland, I’d be all over that! And possibly even willing to do a re-read of this one! Which coming from me, as you know, is BIG!! This is most definitely a book all lovers of fairy tales should read! It contains the classic elements we know and love and it is a truly magical read in essence, if a little befuddling at times. I might just be overanalyzing things too much as I read.

Elegant, ethereal, and beautifully brutal, The Hazel Wood is a fairy tale worth falling for. This is a dream of a book I cannot recommend highly enough. It’s like falling into a nautilus shell: every time you think you've found the end, another chamber opens. Absolutely breathtaking.” — Seanan McGuire, author of Every Heart a Doorway So I went to public school. I hung Christmas lights around the plaster mantel behind our bed, and took a job at a café that turned into a bar when the sun went down. Ella started talking about things she’d never talked about before: painting our walls, buying a new sofa. College applications. Ah, the Hinterland. Seems like an absolutely terrible place to take a vacation, but the best setting ever for dark fairy tales. Hazel’s ability to produce multiple stems gives it a dense, spreading appearance and has led to its extensive use for coppicing. It is a short-lived tree, reaching 50-70 years in age, but if it is coppiced, either by people or naturally through damage to its trunks, it will live much longer.While ethnicities are not explicitly stated (as I recall), it is safe to say all the characters and the settings were pretty ‘white’, which if nothing else, adds to the repetitive nature of the stories. We tried to wait out a full school year in an LA guesthouse Ella rented from an earnest hippie with a trust fund, but four months in the woman’s husband started suffering from symptoms of chronic fatigue. After Ella moved to the main house to help out, the ceiling fell in over the master bedroom, and the hippie sleepwalked into the swimming pool. We didn’t want to start a death count, so we’d moved along.

To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother's tales began . . . Hazel is very important for lichens, and is the best host species in the UK for Graphidion lichens – those which grow on smooth-barked trees. Several of these lichens are rare and endangered, and are the subject of Species Action Plans, including one ( Arthothelium macounii) which is the only host for a parasitic fungus ( Arthonia cohabitans). Another lichen ( Graphis alboscripta) is also almost entirely restricted to hazel, and is only known from Scotland. Hazel is also a good host for the Lobarion group of lichens – the larger, leafy lichens, which include tree lungwort ( Lobaria pulmonaria) – particularly in western Scotland. Male flowers are in the form of catkins, which are pale yellow in colour and up to 5 cm. long. They open in February, when hazel and its companion deciduous trees are all leafless, so they are one of the first obvious signs of spring in the forest. The female flowers are tiny red tufts, growing out of what look like swollen buds, and are visible on the same branches as the male catkins. Pollination is by wind, and hazel is self-incompatible – successful pollination only occurs between different trees, as a single tree cannot pollinate itself.This story was not at all what I expected it to be. It was better in a lot of ways and not soo good in others. Okay, maybe traces. When you read “partnered up with semi-attractive boy of her own age,” or whatever equivalent phrase I wrote in my handy-dandy synopsis (yes, I am literally so lazy that I won’t scroll up in my own review, what of it) I’m sure you assumed “ah, there is th I want to read Tales from the Hinterland (Grandnanny’s book) so badly. If Melissa Albert is smart, or loves me or the world or both, she will write that spinoff."



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