The Hazel Wood: 1

Product Information

If you love fairytales read this story. And read it for itself, because it's an amazing book and shouldn't suffer at the hands of reviewers who are comparison happy. Dear Melissa Albert: Thank you for making this book (which I basically had the idea for - I mean, you mentioned it in a different book, but I am on the record as saying I would like it to be a real book before even you were, so), and thank you for making it everything I wanted it to be, and thank you for giving me a five star read against the odds. I loved the scary-fairy aspect of this story - the stories were so creepy and well-written. I really wish this book had illustrations. I think that would have just brought up to perfection. Although these stories are set in the Hinterland and are part of the series, the collection can be read as stand-alone stories as well. Someone who hasn't read the books but who loves dark fairy tales would still enjoy these 12 stories!

It's a writer problem: now and then, a book comes along with a premise so delicious that you wish you'd thought of it. But there is danger in a book like that. Will it deliver what you want like a golden box full of perfect snowmelt from atop the highest mountain? Or will you open the box to discover the cut-out heart of a poor maiden who never had a fair shot? Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice―and still lives. I also want to note that I’m generally not a big reader of short stories or collections because I prefer more developed characters and plotlines, and the short format is usually too restrictive for that. Fairy tales, however, are an exception. As I alluded to before, many fairy tales are often about something bigger than just the plot at hand. A lot of times, their characters as well as the things they do or feel are also less intrinsic to the story and more about representing something about human nature. I definitely got this vibe with many of the stories in Tales from the Hinterland, and in many cases, the shorter they were, the more meaningful they actually felt, while the longer ones rambled and lost much of their impact. Don’t get me wrong; all the stories in this collection were fun to read, but there were a few meandering, ambiguous ones that failed to hold my attention all the way, like Hansa the Traveler, Ilsa Waits, and even the much acclaimed Twice-Killed Katherine.

Value to wildlife

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. Many of these girls are well-off or royalty, and if they become brides (they usually do at some point), they are often unwilling.

Every protagonist is a young girl who dreams of ~something else, something bigger~. This may have been feminist and groundbreaking years ago, but it is hardly enough these days, without well-written motivations and character arcs. Even if I've read 30+ so far this year with only one more five star to my name. So what. We count our blessings. She is really obsessed with her mom, too. Like, actually the only relationship in her life is with her mom. It’s pretty toxic stuff. Never corrected, because of course not, but there are more books. Fingers crossed. And they do. Ella marries a reeeeaaaaally rich guy. Alice goes to a private school and works in an overpriced pretentious coffee shop. They’re living large.

Mythology and symbolism

What is it that makes Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales special? These stories originally started as oral folk tales, and somehow they were worth the effort of relating to others, and later compiling and publishing them, again and again until they reach us in the 21st century. So much history has been lost, but not these stories about fairy godmothers and princesses and talking animals. Fairy tales with similar plot or motifs are found in different cultures. The story of Cinderella, as a lowly girl who impressed a prince and was eventually identified by him through an article of clothing, existed in Ancient Greece, Middle East and China long before the Grimms added the story to their collection. To that end, classification systems have been created to categorise fairy tales according to their tropes. The letter didn’t seem new. It even smelled like it had been sent from the past. I could imagine someone typing it up on an old Selectric, like the one in the Françoise Sagan postcard I hung up over my bed in every place we stayed. I breathed in its scent of ash and powdery perfume as I scanned what was left. There wasn’t much of it: We send our condolences, and Come at your earliest. All the shenanigans and special-snowflake-ness of an unpopular opinion with none of the pain and full-on suffering of reading a bad book! I should do this more often. Fingers crossed.

Fertilised female flowers grow into nuts which are up to 2 cm. in size and occur in clusters of 1 to 4. Each nut is partially enclosed by a cup-shaped sheath of papery bracts, or modified leaves. The nuts ripen to a brown colour in September and October, with the nut itself enclosed by a tough woody shell. Empty nuts are an occasional occurrence. The blurb makes it sound exactly like the kind of dark fairy tale goodness I love, but if someone had - more accurately - explained that this is a book about a girl called Alice who gets sent to Wonderland the Hinterland where she meets tweedle dee and tweedle dum many colourful characters who talk in riddles, and she finds herself doing bizarre and random things like attending an unbirthday party singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Landslide” in a Tudor-style pub… well, I’d have passed. I’ve already read Alice in Wonderland. Once was enough. This is perhaps because things just get confusing and tangled once you reach the boundary. This isn't helped by the notable change in writing style and despite this being what I was really after, I can't help but think that the slow and aimless first half was better written. The second half devolves into flowery, descriptive prose which could have worked if it wasn't so overbaked but instead fell flat. Strangely, despite this nothing ever actually seems to be explained and explain that contradiction if you would!? Between this and the really slow beginning, I have to admit that it took me far longer than it should of to finish this. I kept putting it down to find more interesting things to do. On the plus side I have a new shiny platinum trophy on my Playstation account...

Threats

The Hazel Wood kept me up all night . . . Terrifying, magical, and surprisingly funny, it's one of the very best books I've read in years' Jennifer Niven, author of All The Bright Places 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. Dark, spellbinding, and magical. One of the most original books I've read in years— The Hazel Wood is destined to be a classic.” — Kami Garcia, author of Beautiful Creatures 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.

Within this large range its distribution is uneven and it typically grows as an understorey component of deciduous forest, especially with oaks ( Quercus spp.), although it also occurs with conifers. The anger receded, leaving a hot embarrassment behind. “I wasn’t going to—” I began, but Lana cut me off. She was always good for that. I love fairy tales because these stories are distillations of people’s hope, beliefs, morals, caution and fears. Little girls shouldn’t stray in the woods by themselves, because bad things will find them. A new stepmother (and her own children) changes the dynamics of the household, and can the grieving child really trust a stranger who is here to replace their own mother? An underdog servant can eventually escape from the daily grind of life, become the belle of the ball and finds her happily ever after, provided that she stays kind, humble and most of all, working for her superiors. A woman’s husband may be beastly, but he would eventually become a prince as long as she keeps waiting, because what other choice does she have? Young girls who don’t live within the rules of society are detrimental, even outright harmful to men, and can only be tamed by men through matrimony. These are the collective experiences and beliefs of the past generations. And in a way, they are still relevant today.

Where to find hazel

Archaeological evidence from pollen analysis has shown there was a rapid expansion in the range of hazel during the Mesolithic period (from 11,000 to 6,000 years ago). Because the large nuts are not dispersed over great distances by small mammals, this has led to speculation that Mesolithic peoples may have transported the nuts with them as a food source, and thereby aided the expansion of the tree’s range. Distribution in Scotland The news hit me like a depth charge, a knot of pain in my stomach that kept expanding. But it had been a long time since I’d spent my hours dreaming of Althea. The news shouldn’t have hurt me at all. The writing is as spare and precise as poetry, connected to the darker, edgier elements of fairy-tale conventions. Albert’s rich and tightly focused collection forms the core of the mythology created in her novels, and her fans will be thrilled at this further glimpse into that world.” ― Booklist, starred review It's like comparing a pineapple and an apple because they're both fruits with "apple" in their names. Honestly the comparison tells me more about what you probably haven't read than it does anything else. And one marooned word in a sea of singed paper: Alice. My name. I couldn’t read anything that came before or after it, and I saw no other reference to myself. I dropped the wet mess into the trash.