Skip to main content

Featured

Blog Tour Review - Looking for Lucie by Amanda Addison

 Blog Tour Review - Looking for Lucie by Amanda Addison "Where are you really from?" It's a question every brown girl in a white-washed town is familiar with, and one that Lucie has never been able to answer. All she knows is that her mother is white, she's never met her father, and she looks nothing like the rest of her family. She can't even talk about it because everyone says it shouldn't matter! Well, it matters to Lucie and-with her new friend Nav, who knows exactly who he is-she's determined to find some answers. What do you do when your entire existence is a question with no answer? You do a DNA test. Looking for Lucie is a fascinating look at what it is like growing up mixed race in contemporary Britain. It's a story about family and culture, and what they can mean for different people, as Lucie tries to figure out where she fits into the world. She doesn't look like any of the rest of her family, and her ethnicity is impossible to figure o
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

Review - The Hazel Wood

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice's life on the road, always a step ahead of the strange bad luck biting at their heels.
But when Alice's grandmother, the reclusive author of a book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate - the Hazel Wood - Alice learns how bad her luck can really get.
Her mother is stolen, by a figure who claims to come from the cruel supernatural world from her grandmother's stories.
Alice's only lead is the message her mother left behind: STAY AWAY FROM THE HAZEL WOOD.
To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother's tales began . . .

This book is dark, mesmerising and thoroughly unsettling.
I felt on edge the whole time I was reading it. The first half of it has that "something out of the corner of your eye" feel that really good scary stories have, that familiar world where there's just something off that you can't quite pin down.  But you keep going, on into the Hazel Wood, and the world starts to take on a dream like feel, hazy, and you're no longer sure what's happening and what's metaphor, what's real and what's just story. 
It's beautifully done. The pacing, the gradual unfolding of the plot, the stories within the story, the language of the writing, it all has incredible subtlety to it. 
The characters are superb too. I loved Ellery Finch, who always felt like he was vibrating with energy and potential. Alice's relationship with him was really interesting, and I liked the lack of any real romantic plot between them. Alice herself is a fascinating character, mostly defined by what we don't know and yet she felt real and complex.
I love fairy stories, and books about fairy stories, and I particularly like the darkness that is so often found just below the surface of these stories. That scary, thrilling side of stories is played out remarkably well in The Hazel Wood.
One of the most atmospheric books I've read in a long time.
I'm giving The Hazel Wood five moons.
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts