Notes
Editorial Reviews:
New York Times bestseller
Seven starred reviews
Indies’ Choice Book Award Finalist
New York Times Notable YA Book of 2018
Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
Wall Street Journal Best Children’s Book of the Year
#1 ABA IndieNext Pick
ABA Indies Introduce Selection
Junior Library Guild Selection
ALA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults List
Seventeen Best YA Book of the Year
The Guardian Best Children’s Book of the Year
Entertainment Weekly Top 10 YA Novel of the Year
Bustle Best YA Book of the Year
BookPage Best Book of the Year
Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year
Indigo Best Book of the Year
Books-a-Million Best Book of the Year
Goodreads Choice Award Finalist
Publishers Weekly Flying Start
Seattle Public Library “10 Young Adult Books We Love 2018”
Romantic Times Seal of Excellence Winner
★ "The Hazel Wood starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth, and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a good book. It's a captivating debut.” - The New York Times
★ "An original and imaginative fairy tale: thrilling, fascinating, and poignant in equal measure. Grade: A-.” - Entertainment Weekly,
★ "Insidiously beautiful, this is the opposite of escapist fantasy; it is a story about the imagination’s power to loose atrocity into the (mostly) law-abiding confines of the real.” - The Guardian
★ "A darkly brilliant story of literary obsession, fairy-tale malignancy, and the measures a mother will take to spare her child.” - The Wall Street Journal
★ "An eerie, assured first novel. Albert occasionally entwines the haunting tales of the grandmother’s book through this mesmerizing narrative, creating a fantasy as lush and twisty as ivy.” - The Washington Post
★ "One of those rare young adult fantasy novels that holds a self-contained world in only a few hundred pages. If the novel’s heroine is a teenage girl, then her story will appeal to readers of all ages, with its intrigue and strange fairy tale magic and very grown up writing.” - Esquire
★ "A can’t-miss, dark, and creepy new take on fairy tales that will have you glued to the page until the very end.” - BuzzFeed
★ "This extremely creepy, wondrously original and beautifully written book conjures up a dark, bloody netherworld of fairytales and enchants and enthralls from the first sentence to the final page.” - The Buffalo News
★ "Simultaneously wondrous and horrific, dreamlike and bloody, lyrical and creepy, exquisitely haunting and casually, brutally cruel. Not everybody lives, and certainly not ‘happily ever after’—but within all the grisly darkness, Alice's fierce integrity and hard-won self-knowledge shine unquenched.” - Kirkus Reviews
★ "An empowering read that will be especially popular with fans of fairy-tale retellings.” - School Library Journal
★ "Fans of the dark supernatural will gobble this up.” - Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
★ "Albert weaves a spellbinding, dark tale. The smoke-and-mirrors world of the Hazel Wood is deliciously creepy and its denizens are well-drawn.” - VOYA