#THE HAZEL WOOD SKIN#

Alice wants to go visit Althea, despite her mother’s attempts to shield and warn. Alice dreams of her grandmother's luxurious house, palatial even, with green lawns and swimming pools. We would expect nothing less from the women of a family with a name like Proserpine.Īs a child on the run, she idealizes her grandmother, and Althea’s fairyland. Inanna can only escape back into life if some living person is willing to trade places with her in the underworld.Īlice makes this decent. Finally, naked and stripped of all her power, she confronts her sister, who kills her. Inanna must hand over a piece of her regalia at each one. She decides to visit her sister, who is queen of the underworld, and passes through seven gates on the way down. Inanna is an ancient Mesopotamian goddess/queen of heaven.

#THE HAZEL WOOD SKIN#

If the male hero’s journey rests atop the structure of the Gilgamesh epic, then the skin and muscle of Albert’s very female saga hang from the skeleton of Inanna’s descent into the underworld. Mesopotamian mythic cycles act as prototypical archetypes for a lot of writing in the European tradition. Albert peels back Disney-fication like a scab, then scraps away at the moralizing platitudes of the Brothers Grimm as well, until we are plumbing the Jungian depths of faerie trauma in the dreamlike world of the Hinterland. Alice’s decent into the Hinterland is an interrogation of the European fairy tale. But there is more to Albert’s writing that just flipping tropes around for the fun of it. She knows her YA tropes and subverts them with wicked glee.

You can’t miss it.Īlbert is also the founding editor of the Barnes & Noble Teen Blog, and managing editor of BN.com. Like the pedigree of Alice, Albert hammers home the tradition she is writing in. She drops the titles of literary speculative-fiction greats from her protagonist’s mouth like the names of celebrities. She knows a thing or two about fine writing. The Hazel Wood is Melissa Albert’s debut novel. But on this day, Alice’s mother gets a letter, telling them that Althea has died and Ella believes their bad luck may finally come to an end. “My mother was raised on fairy tales,” Alice tells her reader, “but I was raised on highways.” Alice has grown up fleeing a strange kind of bad luck that seems to follow her and her mother where ever they go. No one has seen her in years.Īlthea is the also mother of Ella, and the grandmother of Alice, our protagonist. Proserpine has a massive internet following, brimming with fan theories and rumors of conspiracy. Any snippets posted online are instantly taken down. Those who have read the stories are obsessed with them. The book cannot be had for love or money. “The Hazel Wood” is the name of Althea Proserpine’s estate. Althea has one book to her name, a collection of dark fairy tales: “Tales from the Hinterland.” In it, she writes like a war reporter sending back notices from the field of battle.

The hazel wood