{"id":24680,"date":"2018-02-20T07:30:21","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T12:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=24680"},"modified":"2018-02-20T07:30:21","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T12:30:21","slug":"traveling-the-worlds-of-fairy-faery-faerie-fey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=24680","title":{"rendered":"Traveling the Worlds of Fairy \/ Faery \/ Faerie \/ Fey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Hazel Wood<\/em> <\/a>by\u00a0Melissa Albert had been high up in\u00a0my to-read stack for a long time, but it was propelled to the top by my colleague Emily’s recent text. “I have a new obsession,” she wrote, and sent the photo shown at right, adding, “Omg. I’m actually scared. It’s scary! And delicious! I feel like a teenager.” (Emily’s in her young 30’s,\u00a0so she IS practically a teenager, comparatively speaking.) She said she was reading under the covers, she was so scared. Who could resist that level of engagement with a book?!
\nThe premise is creepily appealing: a teenage girl, Alice, has been on the run\u00a0with her single mom all her life, both of them followed by eerie, sometimes violent runs of bad luck in each new way-station and haunted by fragments of\u00a0twisted, dark fairy tales written by Alice’s grandmother\u2014a woman Alice doesn’t know\u2014in a book that is impossible to\u00a0find but has a huge cult following. When Alice’s mother disappears after a particularly disturbing encounter with\u2014but no, that would be telling. Suffice it to say that she disappears, and Alice is frantic to find her. And that fairy tales have a way of\u00a0coming horribly true.
\n
\nWhen I picked up the book, I was immediately hooked, as Emily had been. Melissa Albert\u00a0is one of those writers who puts me in the mood to write; I love her imagery and her seemingly-loose-but-actually-tight structure, her ability to\u00a0create\u00a0fear and dread in the most ordinary settings. While I wasn’t reading it under the covers (I\u00a0must be more hardened to the spooky than Emily), I read it with relish and devoured it in two sittings. Would have been one but I had to work! I loved the book, and craved more.
\nThe fairy tale \/ faery aspects of The Hazel Wood<\/em> and the mood cast by its combination of beauty and\u00a0eeriness\u00a0felt like visiting friends I hadn’t seen in a while.\u00a0It’s not at all that the book isn’t fresh\u2014it is\u2014but there’s something deeply compelling in a particular way about fey tales. It’s like stepping into the world of\u00a0the Brothers Grimm, a place we’ve known since childhood but that never loses its strangeness. If you’d asked me, I would have told you I hadn’t read that many young adult and middle grade fantasies with a faerie component\u2014maybe three or four\u2014but I started making a list, and\u00a0it turns out I’m kind of a faery glutton.
\nIn case you, too, are smitten by the creepy fair folk and your pointy teeth are hungry for more, here\u00a0are some\u00a0books that do justice to a genre that nobody can spell consistently but that these authors deliver beautifully. Click on the covers to learn more! (Many of these are firsts in series; I just included the kickoff title to each.)
\n<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>
\n<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>
\n<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/a>
\n<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>
\n<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>
\n<\/a>\u00a0 <\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>
\nAnd here’s one I can’t wait to read next!\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>
\nDo you have faerie titles that aren’t part of the series shown here? Emily and I are looking for\u00a0more scary-delicious reads that make us feel like teenagers again and\u00a0take us into the dark woods with the fair folk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘The Hazel Wood’ and some of its companions along a dark, twisty, irresistible story path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}