Genre: Fantasy thriller

Romance: Light

Warnings: Some gore and graphic description

If you like witchy stories about rituals, mother-daughter relationships, and missing time, be sure not to miss Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert. This parallel story follows a mother’s descent into magic with some serious teeth, and a daughter uncovering the mystery of a woman who appears suddenly in the woods followed by the appearances of some dead rabbits – and it’s a gripping page-turner. This is by far my favorite book I have read this year and easily one of the best I have read in the last five. Although I finished it weeks ago, I still feel like I am carrying around the scenes, the story, the blood and smoke of a magic that is deliciously dark and also feels starkly real.

Fans of Melissa Albert’s The Hazelwood will not be disappointed to uncover a story that, while more realistic than the fairy tales that live within the Hinterland, still has the same sort of bewitching bite. Our Crooked Hearts also plays with the nature of time, memory, secrets, and mother-daughter relationships – all themes I personally loved about The Hazelwood. However,  Our Crooked Hearts is in some ways less magical than Tales from the Hinterland, and in this way, it is more vicious, real, and painful in its characters’ thoughts, choices, and consequences.

The first parts of the book alternates Ivy and Dana’s stories. Ivy is seventeen and something has always been odd about her distant mother. Whenever something really upsetting happened to Ivy or her brother, it seems like nasty consequences befall the perpetrator, followed by one of her mother’s migraines and a visit from her mother’s best friend, Aunt Fee. Coming home from a party, Ivy is nearly in a car wreck when a naked woman suddenly appears in the road. After her appearance, a dead rabbit is left in Ivy’s driveway. Then, her mother and Aunt Fee are suddenly missing, and Ivy decides to investigate on her own, and begins to uncover details of her mother’s past that seem impossible, frightening, and might involve Ivy herself.

A teenage Dana, who will someday become Ivy’s mother, and her best friend Fee make an incredible discovery one summer: magic is real. A new friend leads them down a path of magic, power, and their costs, and things begin to unravel when a ritual goes horribly wrong.

These two stories intertwine and then come together as the novel progresses, and the complexity, depth, and emotion in the pages is truly a level of mastery that makes this story so real. Like most mothers and daughters, Ivy and Dana have sharp edges, unspoken feelings, and, unlike most mothers and daughters, magical secrets brought about by a string of increasingly bad choices.

The writing style in this book is a magic spell in itself. It sings. It is expressive, interesting, and draws you in to a very real world described in concrete, yet sparkling ways. The writing invites you, too, to believe in the magic of the story, the reality of the moments, and the depth of feeling throughout the work. It’s an incredible treat, and even though the plot is but I can’t put it down now propelled forward by the steady increase of information in the alternating perspective chapters, it also forces the reader to slow down, pay attention, and greedily enjoy every drop of this darkly fabulous book.

Claire Helakoski is a writer, reader, and mother living in Michigan with one husband, two kiddos, and one golden doodle floof.