Books like The Hazel Wood
What should you read after Melissa Albert’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Melissa Albert
- 2018
- Dark fantasy
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Hazel Wood
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
The nearest thing to Albert's atmosphere in print: black-and-white wonder with something predatory behind the tent flap. Come for that, not for the plot.
- Prose that tastes like a fable
- Modern city turning uncanny
- Genuinely frightening imagery
- Almost no narrative urgency
Great matchThe Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
Russian folk stories treated as literal fact by everyone except the priest, told in prose that keeps the cadence of the tales it grew from.
- Prose that tastes like a fable
- Cruel invented fairy tales
- An angry, unlikeable heroine
- Medieval Russia, no modern frame
Best for an unlikeable heroineThe Cruel Prince
Holly Black
Black writes faeries as Albert does: beautiful, indifferent, lethal. And Jude is the same kind of protagonist — angry, calculating, not remotely interested in being liked.
- An angry, unlikeable heroine
- Cruel invented fairy tales
- Genuinely frightening imagery
- Court politics, not fairy tales
Great matchUprooted
Naomi Novik
A Polish-flavoured story about a wood that takes people and does not give them back — folklore horror written with real menace rather than decoration.
- Genuinely frightening imagery
- Prose that tastes like a fable
- An angry, unlikeable heroine
- A romance grows in the middle
Best for the frightening imageryThrough the Woods
Emily Carroll
Five short comics that do what Albert's invented tales do — folklore stripped of comfort, endings that refuse to resolve, and images you will think about at night.
- Cruel invented fairy tales
- Genuinely frightening imagery
- Prose that tastes like a fable
- A graphic novel, not prose
Great matchHis Dark Materials
Philip Pullman
The other great fiction about a girl cutting through into worlds that were never meant to be entered, and adults who will hurt children to keep control of them.
- A door into another world
- An angry, unlikeable heroine
- A family curse you inherit
- A trilogy, over 1,000 pages
Best for the door into another worldCoraline
Neil Gaiman
The purest version of the premise: a door in an ordinary flat, a mother waiting on the other side who is not your mother. Short, and much scarier than its shelf suggests.
- A door into another world
- Genuinely frightening imagery
- Modern city turning uncanny
- Written for children
Best for a gentler readThe Girl Who Drank The Moon
Kelly Barnhill
A town that sacrifices a baby every year to a witch who is not what they think. Fable logic, lovely prose, and none of Albert's cruelty.
- Prose that tastes like a fable
- Cruel invented fairy tales
- A family curse you inherit
- Middle-grade, low threat level
Best for the parallel worldsA Darker Shade of Magic
V.E. Schwab
Four Londons, one man licensed to walk between them, and a smuggled object that should have stayed where it was. Doorways with consequences, played as an adventure.
- A door into another world
- A family curse you inherit
- Adventure, not eerie folklore
Worth a look — with a warningCaraval
Stephanie Garber
A game on an island where nothing shown to you is trustworthy. It shares Albert's rule that the story has its own agenda — with a far lighter touch.
- A door into another world
- Cruel invented fairy tales
- Modern city turning uncanny
- Instalove romance throughout
Worth a look — with a warningThe Starless Sea
Erin Morgenstern
A graduate student finds a book that contains a scene from his own childhood, and follows it underground. Albert's premise, taken to its most maximal conclusion.
- A book inside the book
- A door into another world
- Prose that tastes like a fable
- Plot is close to optional
Great matchThe Book of Lost Things
John Connolly
A grieving boy walks into a country made of the fairy tales he was raised on, and finds them rewritten in blood. The same argument that stories are not safe.
- Cruel invented fairy tales
- A door into another world
- Prose that tastes like a fable
- Wartime England setting
Best for the book inside the bookThe Ten Thousand Doors of January
Alix E. Harrow
A girl, a strange inherited book, and doors between worlds that powerful men would rather stayed shut. It runs on exactly the machinery Albert built.
- A book inside the book
- A door into another world
- Prose that tastes like a fable
- Warmer and more romantic
What should you read after The Hazel Wood?
The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern — the nearest thing to Albert's atmosphere in print: black-and-white wonder with something predatory behind the tent flap. Come for that, not for the plot.
If what stayed with you was prose that tastes like a fable, read The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden instead: russian folk stories treated as literal fact by everyone except the priest, told in prose that keeps the cadence of the tales it grew from. The Cruel Prince by Holly Black is the other strong option — black writes faeries as Albert does: beautiful, indifferent, lethal. And Jude is the same kind of protagonist — angry, calculating, not remotely interested in being liked.
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