Title: The Night Country
Series: The Hazel Wood
Author: Melissa Albert
Page count: 352 pages
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐1/2
In The Night Country, Alice Proserpine dives back into a menacing, mesmerizing world of dark fairy tales and hidden doors. Follow her and Ellery Finch as they learn The Hazel Wood was just the beginning, and that worlds die not with a whimper, but a bang.
With Finch’s help, Alice escaped the Hinterland and her reclusive grandmother’s dark legacy. Now she and the rest of the dregs of fairy tale world have washed up in New York City, where Alice is trying to make a new, unmagical life. But something is stalking the Hinterland’s survivors-and she suspects their deaths may have a darker purpose. Meanwhile, in the winking out world of the Hinterland, Finch seeks his own adventure, and-if he can find it-a way back home…
Goodreads blurb
This book is the sequel to The Hazel Wood, which I definitely recommend rereading BEFORE you read this. I didn’t and had to do that thing were you spend half the book trying to remember things from the first one, mainly because it’s been almost 2 years (wow!) since I’ve read it. I feel like my rating of this book may have suffered a little because of that.
This book picks up roughly 2 years (in our time) after The Hazel Wood ends. It starts with Alice graduating from high school with absolutely no plans for college or the rest of her life, which honestly, same. We see that some of the characters from the Hinterland have had a little bit of difficulty assimilating into this new world’s culture and have formed a support group of sorts. We also see that this group has a clear cut leader named Daphne, who Alice feel repelled by (and for good reasons that are discovered literally 40 pages from the end). As it turns out, someone has been murdering Hinterland survivors and apparently the only one who can find out who is Alice, you know, the 18-year-old. Seriously, where were all of the responsible adults in this book?? I realized after finishing the book that my main gripe with it is that Alice spends most of the book just reacting to things and having things happen to her, rather than taking action. I guess that kind of fits with how old she is though. Not a lot of 18-year-olds would know how to react to or investigate multiple murders.
Finch, on the other hand, is still in the Hinterland, and while 2 years have passed for Alice, it’s only been two months for him. We find that he has formed a ragtag team of survivors who slowly realize that the Hinterland is slowly folding in on itself, and will eventually disappear, or cease to exist. He eventually befriends a girl whose name I know I’m going to misspell (Iodanthe???) and they start going on adventures together, travelling from world to world. Eventually this plotline introduces a story called The Night Country, which is a story about how worlds are made by spinners. This is eventually fleshed out when Ella tells the story to Alice and is where the book becomes DARK. Really dark. But, this doesn’t happen until about 75% of the way through the book, so Finch and Alice’s stories felt very disconnected from each other, for the most part.
One of the things that this book has going for it is the world building. I love dark fairy-tales and this book really nails that without having to be a retelling of the classics like Cinderella or Snow White. The world-building(s) for this series were phenomenal and I can’t wait to see what Melissa Albert does next.
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