Reviews provided by Syndetics
Publishers Weekly Review
Ivy Chase, 17, is on her way home from a party when the car in which she's riding nearly hits a naked young woman standing in the road. A bizarre encounter ensues, and unsettling events follow: a decapitated rabbit appears in Ivy's suburban driveway, and someone else's face flashes in her mirror. After Ivy discovers inexplicable inconsistencies in her childhood memories, she decides to confront her mother, Dana, and honorary aunt, Fee, both of whom seem capable of "unnatural things." Upon arriving at the women's herbal remedies shop, however, Ivy finds the business closed and a surface bloody. Albert (The Hazel Wood) skillfully interweaves Ivy's increasingly urgent search for answers with chapters from Dana's perspective, recounting her and Fee's 16th summer. While at the teens' fathers' fish fry, the motherless, rudderless girls meet Marion Peretz, a lonely 17-year-old who's fond of punk rock and dark magic. Tension and terror mount as the intelligently crafted, viscerally plotted story lines converge. Atmospherically tense prose and vividly sketched, true-to-life characters add depth, resulting in a tale both spellbinding and bingeworthy. Most characters cue as white. Ages 14--up. Agent: Faye Bender, Book Group. (June)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up--It's the beginning of summer, and 17-year-old Ivy (described as white) has been experiencing some weird and possibly supernatural encounters. On top of it all, her mother has been acting strange without explanation, and Ivy can't shake the feeling that she knows more than she should about the boy (also described as white) across the street. As Ivy tries to figure out what's going on, the story of her mother, Dana (again, described as white), unfolds from the past as she experiments with the occult. By the end, the two stories come to a head revealing the dark magic that the two women share and how they will bear this truth together. This is a multi-genre, coming-of-age story that explores diverse relationships that teens will relate to. Albert's fast-paced storytelling is both thrilling and accessible, with her descriptive similes, knowledge of the occult, and imaginative spells. Although the practice of magic is somewhat glorified in this fictional story, the risks and dangers of it are also discussed and acknowledged. Not recommended for younger teens due to underage drinking and smoking and coarse language. VERDICT Teens who enjoy drama, secrets, romance, and mysteries with a twist of magic will love this one. A great addition to young adult collections in public libraries.--Lacey Webster
Booklist Review
Title: Craft and WitchcraftDek: With her haunting new contemporary fantasy, Albert casts a powerful spellIn 2018, Melissa Albert arrived with The Hazel Wood, an auspicious debut that handed readers a delicately cracked looking glass, giving jagged edges to the fairy tales of our collective unconscious. Albert three times lured us into the Hinterland, enchanting fans with a witches' brew of eerie urban fantasy, complex mother-daughter dynamics, and needle-tipped prose--ambitiously honing her craft along the way. Now, with Our Crooked Hearts, her first foray outside the Hazel Wood, she employs familiar themes and techniques, but at a new level of mastery, producing a standalone novel so precise and enthralling that the only possible explanation is that Albert herself is a witch.This time around, the brew features Ivy, a white 17-year-old whose suburban life is corrupted by a series of unsettling events: a naked young woman, strangely familiar, stumbling through the woods; a rabbit carcass stretched out on her driveway; a cabalistic concoction buried by her mother, Dana; lost keepsakes found in her parents' safe; and a nagging feeling that something is out of place. As Ivy begins pulling at the secrets threaded through her life, the story branches apart, introducing intermittent chapters of a teenage Dana, her hard-knock Chicago upbringing, her bond with best friend Fee, their fated meeting with the ambitious Marion, and the trio's ill-fated descent into the occult.The story casts its spell at once, ensnaring readers with incantatory language and a wickedly slow burning plot. The heavy use of metaphor--always on point--adds a subtly otherworldly layer to the text. Meanwhile, Albert carefully adds tension, one element at a time, to the mysteries surrounding Ivy, but revelation isn't the point. It's made clear, early on, that Ivy suspects her mother of being a worker--an occultist, a witch--and as Dana's backstory is layered in, as her coven develops their nascent powers and heads toward a violent break, that theory is confirmed for the reader. The tension continues to thicken, however, out of the fraught, if distant, relationship between mother and daughter and the question of what deeper secrets lie hidden, of how Dana's history ties into the missing pieces of the puzzle that is Ivy's life.Here, in the pacing and structure, Albert's meticulous craftwork shines. As the short chapters alternate between Ivy in "the suburbs, right now" and Dana in "the city, back then," a pattern emerges of rising and sharply falling suspense. The frequent interruptions prevent either story arc from making a more dramatic climb, and while that may frustrate thirsty readers, it lends a serrated edge to the knifing tension that grows with every section. More importantly, the two time lines don't simply run parallel but rather inform one another, working in harmony as information is revealed in one thread that adds crucial context to the other. This slow-burn approach gives consistency to the pacing and keeps readers solidly under Albert's simmering spell.And while the novel is bookended by Ivy's anchoring point of view, the greater story proves to be as much Dana's as hers. It raises questions about the line between our parents' stories and our own. Here, as in life, they overlap--and even echo one another, at times. The result is a nuanced and emotionally epic exploration of the characters through their relationships, through the choices they make and the ensuing consequences. Albert manages to infuse the text with the agonizing pain of a parent reckoning with her mistakes and holding onto the hope that our children can save us--and themselves. Which, of course, Ivy does, in a scorching-hot full-boil finale."I didn't know joy and sorrow could lodge together so tightly." Me neither, Ivy. But with evocative prose, attention to detail, and patient pacing--not to mention a beautifully understated romance--Albert is able to conjure a deeply resonant emotional reality, as well as a fully realized, wonderfully creepy reality-reality, and for a horror-tinged fantasy, that is especially engrossing. This is a novel that will be devoured as well as savored. It takes risks and, magically, succeeds. Of course, the magic is in the execution, in the craft. And whether or not Albert is in fact a witch, one thing is for sure: her words are magic.
Horn Book Review
This eerie fantasy's perspective alternates between that of Ivy, a present-day teen, and Dana, Ivy's mother, during her own early teen years. Unexplained things are happening in Ivy's story line -- a naked girl shows up in the woods at night; dead rabbits keep appearing. The novel gradually introduces this strangeness, as well as Ivy and her mother's strained relationship, and, in Dana's chapters, a character named Marion who's obsessed with the occult. Ivy's investigation of her mom's past slowly pieces together their fraught history as mother and daughter. As Dana's chapters progress through time to the present, they build to a key, unremembered incident from Ivy's own past, which sheds light on everything that readers have seen so far. Slow revelations build tension and keep pages turning, while the dual point of view allows readers to empathize with both protagonists' motivations, even as each one finds it hard to understand the other. A carefully constructed novel that will invite re-readings. Shoshana Flax September/October 2022 p.76(c) Copyright 2022. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Book Review
A complicated history of witchcraft binds a mother and daughter. One night, on their way home after a tempestuous breakup, 17-year-old Ivy and her wannabe-hipster ex, Nate, nearly run over a naked woman standing in the middle of a deserted road. This catalyzing moment propels Ivy down a semiliteral rabbit hole after she begins stumbling across the bodies of dead, mutilated rabbits and cannot seem to shake the feeling of being watched. In alternating chapters, readers meet tough-as-nails Dana and her best friend, Fee. The pair welcome into their circle Marion, a beguiling rich girl who entices them with promises of magic from a mysterious grimoire. When the trio attempt a dubious spell, the results are disastrous, changing the course of their--and Ivy's--lives forever. Here, Dana's and Ivy's narratives intertwine, rocketing toward a nail-biting conclusion guaranteed to keep readers up all night. Albert's tale of mothers and daughters examines fraught choices and forgiveness against a cleverly insidious backdrop that will leave readers unable to see rabbits the same way again. While a romance is present, love in all its forms--platonic, parental, and romantic--is thoughtfully explored with gravitas and nuance. Main characters are predominantly White. Riveting, creepy, and utterly bewitching; do not miss this one. (Paranormal. 13-adult) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
TextPublisher: New York : Flatiron Books, 2022Edition: First editionDescription: 340 pages ; 22 cmContent type: