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OUR CROOKED HEARTS

Melissa Albert

A new a standalone urban/suburban contemporary fantasy about secrets, lies, super-bad choices, and, yes, witchcraft, bestselling author Melissa Albert delivers: OUR CROOKED HEARTS is a little bit dark, a little bit creepy, a little bit witchy and all spectacular.
The suburbs, right now:
Seventeen-year-old Ivy's summer break kicks off with an accident, a punishment, and a mystery: a feral stranger whose appearance in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, heralds a string of increasingly unsettling events. As the days pass, she grapples with eerie offerings, corroded memories, and a secret she's always known: there's more to her prickly, distant mother than meets the eye.

The city, back then:
Dana Nowak has always been perceptive. And the summer she turns sixteen, with the help of her best friend and a lonely, ambitious older girl, her gifts bloom into a heady fling with witchcraft, set against the backdrop of a city of diverse magical possibilities and secret mystics. As the trio's ambitions darken, they find themselves speeding toward a violent breaking point.

Though Dana moves on to marriage and early motherhood, she soon discovers the darkness she thought she'd put behind her never truly went away. Twenty-five years after it began, the story she began writing at sixteen will come down to a reckoning among a mother, a daughter, and the forces they never should've messed with.

Melissa Albert is the New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood and The Night Country. She was the founding editor of the Barnes & Noble Teen Blog and has written for McSweeney's, Time Out Chicago, and MTV. Melissa is from Illinois and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Published 2022-06-28 by Flatiron Books

Book

Published 2022-06-28 by Flatiron Books

Comments

A riveting story that grips you like a spell until you're too deep to emerge unscathed! Once again, Melissa Albert reveals the power of magic within a daughter'rs grasp and the love of imperfect mothers.

I read Our Crooked Hearts with my heart in my throat the entire time. I didn't want to put it down when I was on the couch. I didn't want to put it down when I was on a plane. I didn't want to put it down at work. What a story about family, found and the one you're born into - but also what a story about mothers and daughters and how hard being a teen can be no matter what generation you're part of and what you'll do to find yourself.

This book had me in its CLUTCHES...

Our Crooked Hearts is a dark novel of witchcraft and betrayal infused with the effervescence of a gritty, aged up Coraline. It's a neon-lights-on-city-streets urban fantasy with a haunted-house-heart, and I loved it. Melissa Albert has a very unique skill set of writing absolutely gorgeous novels that creep way, way under your skin. This one will have you looking at the world around you with new eyes.

Nobody writes like Melissa Albert. Her words are electric, sizzling; they crash through the bloodstream with the same force as the magic she conjures in her stories. Our Crooked Hearts is Albert at her very best; a sharp explosion of a book that's taut, haunting, and potent as a witch's brew.

Melissa Albert's inimitable and gritty take on magic is beautifully woven in this poignant and striking story of mothers and daughters, power and balance, and love and betrayal. Our Crooked Hearts feels like a freshly spun secret; electric, dangerous - and impossible to keep to yourself.

Melissa Albert's signature storytelling is once again pure sorcery. This book has everything I love: girls with tremendous power at their fingertips, mothers with unforgivable secrets, horrors left on the doorstep, and best of all, writing that sings and stuns. To those with a crookedness inside you: You are about to be enthralled.

In Our Crooked Hearts, Albert deftly uses a creepy, atmospheric story about dark magic to explore the complexity of mother-daughter relationships and how one deals with the consequences of one's actions... Albert's creativity and imagination shine through in her world-building and lush language, leaving readers with a spellbinding, skin-tingling sensation.

The book has also been sweeping June/Summer roundup lists, appearing on Frolic, CrimeReads, LitHub, B&N Reads, Beyond the Bookends, EpicReads, The Booklist Queen, Bookish, and Horror Obsessive with more still to come!

A new classic YA. Our Crooked Hearts is unputdownable - creepy, delicious and intriguing, you can't stop turning the pages to figure out what exactly is going on. If Francesca Lia Block and The Craft came together, Our Crooked Hearts would be it. I will never look at a rabbit the same way again.

Eerie, evocative, and electrifyingly brilliant. I was immediately gripped from the very first page and completely compelled throughout. I already can't wait to reread it. Melissa Albert's writing is magic made real.

Two summers of stolen secrets, glittering broken glass, and encroaching darkness collide in this fantastic venture from the author of The Hazel Wood. Eerie, unsettling, and slightly macabre, Albert's tale of mothers, daughters, and the secrets they keep is hair-raising and impossible to put down. This is exactly the kind of contemporary fantasy I've been craving and Our Crooked Hearts more than delivers.

The gravity of Albert's prose in Our Crooked Hearts is inescapable. I love the glint and grind of its magic - its tangled inheritance, the sacrifices it demands, the bonds it makes and breaks. This book will swallow you whole.