What a delightfully twisted collection of tales and fables! From the author of The Hazel Wood and The Night Country comes the elusive treasury of stories which inspired the events in the series. These are not your mother’s fairy tales, and certainly not things you want to read before bed at night. Melissa Albert has delivered the dark feminist stories from your wildest dreams and most menacing nightmares.

As expected, I liked some stories over others. Some of my favourites included The Door that Wasn't There, The Skinned Maiden and Ilsa Waits. Some I felt more meh about were The House Under the Stairwell, The Sea Cellar and The Mother and the Dagger. As all of this hit me, he was already standing up, grabbing his book off the table, and striding out of the café. Before the bells on the door stopped jingling, I was after him. Someone’s laptop cord crossed my path, and I nearly sent the thing flying; by the time I finished apologizing and wrenched open the door, the man was out of sight. I looked up and down the quiet sidewalk, my hands itching to hold a cigarette—my mom and I had quit when we moved in with Harold. Beyond all of the ways in which Alice's character is incredibly harmful and is rarely - if ever - challenged for most of her behaviors, she's also just not well-written. She's hypocritical, self-contradicting, and outright boring.

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Fans of The Hazel Wood series have long asked for Tales From the Hinterland, the book that Althea Proserpine had written before her daughter Ella and granddaughter Alice fled from her. The consequences of writing such a book were heavy, so Althea shut herself away as copies of the book disappeared from the public over the years. Readers have received snippets and summaries of these stories, a couple of extended passages as they applied to the plot at hand, but most of the contents have felt just out of reach—until now. Highly literary, occasionally surreal, and grounded by Alice’s clipped, matter-of-fact voice, The Hazel Wood is a dark story that readers will have trouble leaving behind.” — Booklist, starred review The pollen of hazel species, which are often the cause for allergies in late winter or early spring, can be identified under magnification (600×) by their characteristic granular exines bearing three conspicuous pores. [8] Species [ edit ]

The novel begins with an excerpt from Vanity Fair explaining the mystery behind the author of a book called Tales from the Hinterlands named Althea Proserpine. The narrator calls this person her grandmother and explains that she and her mother, Ella, have been living on the road for years. As a child, she was temporarily kidnapped by a red haired man who claimed to be a fan of Althea who she believed might be her father. However, when police found her, Ella claimed to have never seen the man. The narrator says that she was 17 when Althea died and her mother was overjoyed. Instead of claiming the estate that was theres, they head to New York where the narrator reveals her name: Alice. For that reason you may find some of these stories more familiar than others, especially if you’ve recently read the other two books. I haven’t read either in about a year, so there wasn’t any part that felt redundant for me. A few of the names and general tone I recognized, but I didn’t feel like I knew what was going to happen next based off of that. If I could start to guess how a story would end, it was probably because they all had similar themes. There’s usually a young girl or woman, she makes a choice and it has grim consequences. There are very few happy endings in Tales From the Hinterland, and even the ones that do usually have a sinister twist to them. I stared at her, then around at the room we were sitting in: rich and stuffy and somebody else’s. “Wait. Does it mean we get the Hazel Wood?” Many of these girls are well-off or royalty, and if they become brides (they usually do at some point), they are often unwilling. Don’t look now, but Guy in the Hat is here.” My coworker, Lana, breathed hot in my ear. Lana was a ceramicist in her second year at Pratt who looked like David Bowie’s even hotter sister and wore hideous clothes that looked good on her anyway. Today she was in a baggy orange Rebel Alliance–style jumpsuit. She smelled like Michelangelo must have—plaster dust and sweat. Somehow that looked good on her, too.

Somehow, these stories managed to speak to people across different social classes, living in different countries and culture. Whether these stories travelled from one place and managed to take root in another, or whether they were created and evolved independently, the fact that they exist in so many forms is still absolutely remarkable. And somehow, these stories that resonate in the past, still resonate now, centuries later.

Yet, one of the most divisive claims is that Althea Proserpine wrote 'feminist fairy-tales' - of which we hear possibly two and a half - that aren't really feminist at all, and are barely worthy of the title of fairytale. They were flat, without feeling, without ambience and without a moral. In short, Althea's tales are pointless, making the story itself pointless. So, yeah, definitely not for me, but I would recommend this for those who like Wonderland retellings, and those who enjoy really lyrical prose over characters and/or plot. In this brutal and beautiful world 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. 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 (Best Children’s Book of the Year)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 is easy to see these fairy tales are far from diverse, as most characters are beautiful young girls eligible for marriage, and the rest are portrayed in an unfavourable light, or at best only briefly mentioned. Modern fairy tales should have space for more people. Not all protagonists fit the same mould, but they still deserve their own story. Some of them are:

The main character in "The Hazel Wood" is also named Alice. She seeks out a terrifying and oddball place where logic is tied to story and story is a cold and relentless taskmaster. She is too old and broken to be resilient but she's on a quest, darn it. He kidnapped me when I was six. I think he might be a Time Lord. “Nobody. I mean, he was nobody. I was wrong, I thought I recognized him but I didn’t.”Darker, bloodier and even stranger than THE HAZEL WOOD, THE NIGHT COUNTRY invites the wolf from the forest inside your home. A sinister jewel of a novel, like splitting a pomegranate and finding the inside filled with blood and rubies, every sentence of this book thrilled and chilled me to the bone.' Melinda Salisbury, bestselling author of The Sin Eater's Daughter