Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!
I’ve been a huge fan of Melissa Albert ever since I fell in love with The Hazel Wood series way back when (2018? No way…I feel old…). I forget how or why it’s taken me so long to pick up her follow-up, Our Crooked Hearts, but it was worth the wait—this novel made me remember exactly what endeared me to Albert’s writing in the first place!
Enjoy this week’s review!
Our Crooked Hearts – Melissa Albert
Ivy has found herself at the center of string of unexplainable events. An eviscerated rabbit in her driveway. Secrets buried in the backyard. And now, a nude woman in the middle of the road that Ivy and her boyfriend almost hit with their car. The more she digs into these strange happenings, the more they lead to her mother, who dabbled in forbidden magic when she was a teenager. Ivy, now the age that her mother was when she started tapping into the supernatural, wonders if this magic has come back with a vengeance—and if there’s a way to control it before it comes back for her mother.
TW/CW: animal death/abuse/torture, blood, gore
I don’t know why it took me this long to pick up Our Crooked Hearts and how I could’ve possibly gone three years without reading something of Melissa Albert’s, because wow. This one toes the line between magical realism and horror, but either way you took it, there’s no doubt that Albert is the master of YA magical realism!
Let’s start with Albert’s obvious strength: the lyrical nature of her prose. Though Our Crooked Hearts wasn’t steeped in fairytales like the Hazel Wood duology was, it was no less enchantingly written. Every line feels like its own fairytale, full to bursting with metaphors so unique I found myself highlighting up and down the page. Albert has the ability to weave magic into the smallest of things, from the small moments in the suburbs to the unexplainable events that litter the plot like strange trinkets found on the side of the road. The Hazel Wood was already luscious, but Our Crooked Hearts feels like a maturation of everything that makes Albert’s writing good: a recognition of the magic in everything, but also of the darkness behind the glitter.
The way that Albert writes magic itself was just as compelling! Though the magic system itself is not gone into depth, it’s understood to be the kind of magic that only awakens in the shadows, summoned by girls left to their own devices without any clue of the consequences. I understood some of the unexplained bits to be a byproduct of how little Dana, Fee, and Marion understood of what they were getting themselves into—they knew about as much as we do. Like the relationships running through this novel (more on that later), it is an undercurrent to every decision that they make, rooted in revenge but later a series of bandages to throw over every little breadcrumb they leave behind by accident. On that note, I loved that this wasn’t simply a revenge story—it started as such, but that revenge grew into something so monstrous that it was spread down through generations. Hmm, sure feels like a metaphor to me…
Our Crooked Hearts is written in a dual POV between timelines, following our protagonist, Ivy, and her mother, Dana; Ivy’s perspective finds her in a quiet suburb, while Dana’s perspective is set in Chicago in the ’90s. I loved how the two of them evolved in tandem—dual POVs aren’t especially difficult to pull off, but having them set in different timelines was such a wonderful move to not only elevate the story, but deepen the mother-daughter relationship at the heart of the novel. In terms of literary fiction, I feel like there’s a trend of multigenerational novels (somehow they’re all set in New York) where they hop between time periods and family members; sometimes they’re successful (see: Elizabeth Acevedo), but often, they miss the nuance of familial connection and just focus on being literary. This is far from literary fiction (complimentary), but what this novel does that a lot of others don’t is make the timelines feel distinct. Ivy and Dana have radically different personalities, and though their journeys of dabbling in forbidden magic are similar, their goals—and endpoints—were so different that I found myself fully invested in both of them.
Mother-daughter relationships are at the heart of Our Crooked Hearts, and the dual POV makes for such a fascinating examination of when such relationships become toxic, and the events building up to the toxicity once Dana began raising Ivy. Dana’s perspective was one of constantly being pulled along—by her friends, by authority figures, and by forbidden magic beyond her comprehension. The guilt that resulted from living a life predicated almost entirely on the decisions of other people tragically informed how Ivy grew up—picking up the pieces, and discovering the pieces of her mother along the way. Without spoiling the ending, I loved how it was resolved—there’s no immediate absolution of guilt once familial ties are brought up (unlike a certain recent Disney film beginning with E), but there’s an understanding to how and why things turned out the way they did. Ivy is still left to sift through the wreckage, but all that she thought was lost was not far beyond reach.
Also, one thing that Melissa Albert can always be counted on is top-tier music references. All she had to do was mention Dana putting Liz Phair on the jukebox, and I was already foaming at the mouth.
All in all, a horrific and lyrical observation on magic and teenage girlhood, mothers and daughters. 4 stars!
Our Crooked Hearts is a standalone, but Melissa Albert is also the author of The Hazel Wood duology (The Hazel Wood, The Night Country, and the companion novel Tales from the Hinterland) and The Bad Ones. She is also the founder of the Barnes & Noble Teen Blog.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 