THE HAZEL WOOD

Bad luck wears many faces, and 17-year-old Alice has seen them all, from abduction, fire, and flood to strange visitors in the night. She and her mother have spent most of her life on the road, always a step ahead of the vicious bad luck biting at their heels.

But when Alice's grandmother, the reclusive author of a book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: The man who kidnapped her more than a decade ago tracks her to a coffee shop. An intruder leaves her a terrifying gift. And her mother is stolen away—by a figure who claims to have come from the Hinterland, the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother's stories are set. Alice's only lead on finding her is the message she left behind: "Stay away from the Hazel Wood."

A web of fairy-tale menace tightens around Alice as she allies with a classmate and Hinterland superfan with his own reasons for wanting to help her. To retrieve her mother and uncover the twisted secrets behind her bad-luck life, she must journey first to the Hazel Wood, then into the heart of the world where her grandmother's stories began—and where her bad luck could finally be ended.

THE HAZEL WOOD will appeal to readers who love Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next Novels, Lev Grossman’s MAGICIANS series, and who can’t wait to get their hands on Stephanie Garber’s Caraval. It is a dream come true for anyone who has ever mainlined fairy tales.

Melissa Albert is the founding editor of the Barnes & Noble Teen Blog and the managing editor of BN.com. She has written for Time Out Chicago, SparkLife, MTV, McSweeney's, and more.