I’m mostly a literary fiction reader, but every once in a while I like to read something a bit different. This book was presented as YA fantasy based on fairy tales, and since I’m a huge fan of folklore and fairy tales, so this seemed to hit a lot of things I like.

Well.

Not really.

While I was expecting this to be a fun, light book, as I read I got more and more frustrated because I could see what was wrong with it. While I wouldn’t call it “the worst book I’ve read” (this ain’t momma’s first rodeo), it definitely felt like it miss way more than it hit.

So let’s start with structure, because it was mainly what threw me off the plot while I was reading. Usually, structure is something I might notice in a reread, not on a first look. But since there were so many problems with it in this novel, it just stuck out as messy and disorganized.
I really like well-structured novels, and in this particular novel I would’ve thought that the author should have put more care into it. Since the story has a lot to do with fairy tales, and they tend to be very clearly and tightly structured, the poorly done structure is even more noticeable.

What do I mean with “poorly done”?

Based on the idea of a three-act structure, action should have a clear progression from the inciting incident to the climax. And while the novel has a clear inciting incident (mother is kidnapped and girl has to get her back) and a climax (girl is thrown into her story and has to break out of it), the pacing, the rhythm of the story is all over the place.

The first act begins with exposition: we find out about Alice’s previous nomadic childhood, her current life in New York, her famous grandmother (who wrote a book of feminist fairy tales that sounds a bit like Angela Carter), and her relationship with her mother. The inciting incident doesn’t happen until the 6th chapter (around a 15% of the book), and Alice sets off in her journey to find her mother and solve the mysteries around her grandmother (who supposedly died earlier on).
And then… the plot drags. Oh, lord, it drags so much. Alice enlists the help of one of her classmates, a very rich kid who happens to be a massive Grandmother fan. He’s actually one of the good characters in the book: he has a compelling backstory, and actually has a motivation to follow Alice.
By the title of the book, we already know that the Hazel Wood (which is the name of the grandmother’s house in upstate New York) is going to play a big role in the plot. So, of course Finch and Alice are going to get there at one point. And they do. In chapter 21, around the 60% of the book.

It wouldn’t be a problem if the plot was progressing in a steady way. But the characters spend a lot of the second act doing really pointless stuff. At first they go to get a copy of the book (which is basically impossible to find, despite the fact that it is assigned in college courses), but the seller is weirded out by a photo of Alice and Finch sleeping they find in the book.

So, they don’t get the book and go on their way.

Then they go to a grad student who basically stalked the grandmother, who tells them not to go and explains that she once went with a friend who was killed there, and she returned seven years older. The whole purpose of the whole fucking scene is that Alice sees a newspaper clipping about mysterious deaths in a town called Birch and to establish that the Hazel Wood is dangerous. As if the mother being kidnapped was not enough.

Then they drive upstate, get to know each other and finally arrive to the woods, where Finch is killed for no other reason than pure shock value (you’ll see what I mean later). Then, Alice goes ino the house, where she finds out that her grandmother is actually alive, but wants to die despite “she” not wanting her to go. “Her” is the Spinner, who seems to be the actual big bad for this book and she won’t show up until the end of chapter 26. Also, the stories the grandmother wrote actually are real and happening in a parallel universe. It turns out that Alice is actually a character in one of the stories (Alice-Three-Times) and the Spinner wanted her to return to the Hinterland so she could finish her story. Of course, Alice doesn’t want to do it, because the story is kinda awful. But then the Spinner tells her that she can still change her fate and escape the story.

So, of course, Alice does precisely that. She escapes the story, gets out of the Hinterland, and gets reunited with her mother. Oh, and Finch is not dead anymore (hence the absurd shock value of his earlier death), but he doesn’t return to NY because he wants to explore the fairy tale worlds. We also find out that the Hinterland is falling in disrepair so people there are coming into our world, but the story sort of ends there. The denouement of the plot is resolved in three chapters, which is less time than the characters spent travelling upstate. I was left wondering “that was IT?” The whole plot was spent “building up” (not really, see all the dragging) to this big dramatic conclusion, and the protagonist just… walks away?

Seriously?

Another thing that really bugged me was that a lot of things didn’t have any pay off or consequence to the plot. Take the scene where a police stops them and Alice antagonizes him, despite Finch telling her to stop. He’s black and he argues that the police have a history of killing black men in similar situation. He makes a good point, but the scene also has zero consequences later: it doesn’t foreshadow anything, race is not ever mentioned again, and Alice doesn’t seem to learn anything from it. It seems to be there to shoehorn a topic for woke-points in a story where it just doesn’t fit at all.

Same goes to Alice’s stepsister, Audrey. She is very present in the first act (we even learn she doesn’t poop at school) but then she disappears. She doesn’t do anything useful to the plot, besides telling Alice that her mom said to stay away from the Hazel Wood. She shows up in the end, but nothing really comes from it. Early in the novel, Alice gets magical things (like in fairy tales, see!) that she is meant to use in her way. All of the elements come out when she’s in the woods, but they all get used in the span of one chapter in a way that seemed really lazy and easy.

The prose is generally good. However, some metaphors and description were a little on the flowery/purple side for me. Whenever I read prose like that, I feel as if the author is just being overindulgent and trying to show how clever and poetic they are. I get that the idea was to give a fairy tale feeling to the novel, but it didn’t work for me.

As for the characters, I felt that they were not as rounded as they could have been. Alice felt really flat most of the time, and I’m not sure if the girl who ended the story was substantially different from the one who started it. Finch, as I already said, was compelling, but since he was relegated to a secondary role, he was also rather static. I like my books to be very character-driven, and this book was clearly very plot-driven, which is not really my thing.

Over all, I believe that this book could’ve been a lot better if the structure was more tightly woven and there was a better character development. The skeleton of a good story was definitely there somewhere, but the execution was so poor it was hard to focus on the good aspects of this novel.