The last sentence of Holly Black’s newest book sums up everything I loved about it. I can’t quote it here, because it’s got all the spoilers, but if you are the sort of person who reads the end, go check it out yourself. If I were in middle school I would draw hearts around it after writing it in the back of my school notebook. (I mean, I wouldn’t hundred-percent rule that out as a possibility now.)
Hazel and Ben (both named after famous rabbits) live in a town that the humans share with the faeries. For years and years, the two groups have kept an uneasy kind of peace: The humans leave the faerie folk alone, and the faerie folk confine most of their malice to the tourists who come through Fairfold. Except that suddenly, all of this has changed. The horned sleeping boy in his glass coffin has awoken, and the humans of Fairfold are under attack.
If you are one to pick nits, there are nits here to be picked. Not every part of the plot makes flawless sense, and if certain characters had just been more forthright with certain other characters, in areas where they had every reason to be, some things could have been resolved more swiftly and more simply. And if you are reading this book right after the quite tightly plotted and tricksy Curse Workers trilogy, the contrast might be marked.
I luckily did not mind about any of these things, having read the Curse Workers trilogy way back in December and several disappointed reviews of this book recently. Low expectations plus unexpected diversity in the cast of characters equals WIN.
Here’s something I loved: Hazel’s love interest is a faerie boy, once a changeling. His human mother, a Nigerian American woman of exceptional determination, got her original baby back from the faeries and decided to keep the changeling baby as well.
Besides mandatory family games on Sundays, his mother was the kind of parent who packed lunches in stacked bento boxes, who knew exactly how her kids were doing in every subject, who monitored television time to make sure homework got done. As far as she was concerned, Carter and Jack were headed for Ivy League colleges, ideally close enough to Fairfold that she could drive up and do their laundry on weekends. Nothing was supposed to get in the way of that.
I cannot, can never ever, resist the story of a changeling who wants to be good and normal and not wicked. See also Cuckoo Song and The Replacement. My love is predictable that way. Though Jack is not the focus of this story, nor is Hazel’s crush on him, his existence is one of many excellent, unusual ideas by Holly Black that kept Forest feeling fresh and unexpected.
Add to that another of Holly Black’s ferocious, warrior-girl heroines, and you get a book tailor-made to please my fickle heart. And that last sentence. So good.