The Hazel Wood: 1

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Did her insides match her outsides? Was the way my life dripped off me like water, barely leaving a mark, normal? The second half basically is Alice in Wonderland. Which may or may not sound appealing, but my tolerance level for random weirdness isn't that high. I had the idea, when Ella started going out with Harold, that I’d make Lana into my friend so I’d have someone of my own, but it hadn’t really worked that way. She was more into having an audience than a pal. Within this large range its distribution is uneven and it typically grows as an understorey component of deciduous forest, especially with oaks ( Quercus spp.), although it also occurs with conifers. The nuts of all hazels are edible. The common hazel is the species most extensively grown for its nuts, followed in importance by the filbert. Nuts are also harvested from the other species, but apart from the filbert, none is of significant commercial importance. [5]

It makes such a detailed, realistic world (v helpful for magical realism as bonkers as this) and is also just the best reading experience. Until Ella gets kidnapped, and Alice is forced to do exactly what she was told NOT to do: Team up with one of Grandmummy’s crazy fans (her semi-attractive classmate, Ellery Finch) and go to G-ma’s estate (The Hazel Wood). Hazel is known from all parts of Scotland, including the Outer Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland, and was formerly much more abundant, especially on some of the Hebridean islands. On the mainland, it is common in the western Highlands, and there are stands of almost pure hazel in Argyll. Elsewhere, it occurs in the more fertile, lower-lying parts of the country, usually in association with oak ( Quercus spp.), ash ( Fraxinus excelsior) and also birch ( Betula spp.). It is rarely found on acid soils, such as those of the pinewoods of the Caledonian Forest, and is also uncommon in the Southern Uplands, but this is most likely due to the extensive deforestation of that region, rather than a natural absence. Archaeological evidence from pollen analysis has shown there was a rapid expansion in the range of hazel during the Mesolithic period (from 11,000 to 6,000 years ago). Because the large nuts are not dispersed over great distances by small mammals, this has led to speculation that Mesolithic peoples may have transported the nuts with them as a food source, and thereby aided the expansion of the tree’s range. Distribution in Scotland

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Corylus has around 14–18 species. The circumscription of species in eastern Asia is disputed, with World Flora Online and the Flora of China differing in which taxa are accepted, within this region. WFO accepts 17 species while Flora of China accepts 20 species (including Corylus mandshurica). It's about seeing beneath your own skin to the motivations you may not even want to admit to. And then seeing others the same way. And it's all wrapped in a frayed and bloody ribbon of magic and fairytale, of wandering lost so that you might be found. An original and imaginative fairy tale: thrilling, fascinating, and poignant in equal measure.” — Entertainment Weekly (Best YA Book of the Year) And one marooned word in a sea of singed paper: Alice. My name. I couldn’t read anything that came before or after it, and I saw no other reference to myself. I dropped the wet mess into the trash. Most men from the stories only ever take and take and take from women, whether intentionally or not.

The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Albert, Melissa. The Hazel Wood. Flatiron Books, 2018. Hardcover. The Hazel Wood kept me up all night. Terrifying, magical, and surprisingly funny, it's one of the very best books I've read in years.' -Jennifer Niven This first half(ish) seemed very slow and longer than necessary. It is mostly a road trip where the characters rely on fairy tale logic along the lines of if it wants you to find it, you will instead of smarts and deduction to keep the story moving. A romance develops but, to the author's credit, she never allows this to become a romantic book overall. Every protagonist is a young girl who dreams of ~something else, something bigger~. This may have been feminist and groundbreaking years ago, but it is hardly enough these days, without well-written motivations and character arcs.

The Celts equated hazelnuts with concentrated wisdom and poetic inspiration, as is suggested by the similarity between the Gaelic word for these nuts, cno, and the word for wisdom, cnocach.

Death and the Woodwife Beware the hallow-eyed man who make their living on the road, beware the riddles and the pretty things they sell.The woodwife suffers death but no more. Collections of stories that exist in other novels seem to be gathering popularity lately, and in this case, I think it really works. I was dying to read these all through the Hazel Wood duology, and in a rare turn of events, I think I like them a bit more than the actual novels. They’re dark and deliciously creepy, sometimes with a grim, fairytale-like moral and sometimes not, and while I liked some more than others, I never found my attention wandering in any of them. It’s almost perfectly paced, with none of the stories being ridiculously longer than the others, and I appreciate Albert keeping them short and sweet. (Or, er, short and bloody, as the case may be.) I’m not very moved by the illustrations or the overall color scheme (green and orange aren’t a great combination), but I enjoyed the overall aesthetics of the book. It felt like I was holding something just a little bit magical. While ethnicities are not explicitly stated (as I recall), it is safe to say all the characters and the settings were pretty ‘white’, which if nothing else, adds to the repetitive nature of the stories.