Rating: 3/5
Buy The Darkest Part of the Forest.
Cover Blurb:
"Hazel and her brother, Ben, live in Fairfold, where humans and the Folk exist side by side. Since they were children, Hazel and Ben have been telling each other stories about the boy in the glass coffin: that he is a prince and they are valiant knights. But as Hazel grows up, she puts aside those stories. Hazel knows the horned boy will never wake.
Until one day, he does ....
Set in the same world as the bestselling Folk of the Air series (The Cruel Prince, The Wicked King, and The Queen of Nothing), The Darkest Part of the Forest is Holly Black's triumphant return to the opulent, enchanting faerie tales that launched her career."
Review:
This book has been immensely difficult to review for so many reasons, but its scheduled publication date has been creeping closer for several weeks, so here we are. All reviews have to start somewhere, so I’ll start this one at the beginning, or, rather, with the first two thirds of the novel.
The first half of this book (plus some) absolutely crawled by for me and I almost DNFed this book several times. But I really, really don’t like giving up on a book unless there’s a plot hole the size of Crater Lake forming, the plot has been derailed, or I am certain that the direction the story is heading in just isn't for me, so I carried on.
There’s a lot of backstory in this book and there are a lot of flashbacks. The first two thirds of this novel could have been condensed down to about thirty pages (Maybe a bit more, if we're being generous …), but it wasn’t. And, by consequence, I found myself continuously checking to see if I was over halfway done, yet.
Now, the funny thing is that all of that backstory and all of those flashbacks did absolutely nothing to help me connect to the characters. I couldn’t relate to the main characters in this book at all. Hazel made decisions I couldn’t understand and kept secrets that would have made the book more interesting if they’d been shared early on. She also spent half of her time on the page talking about kissing boys, only to later shame herself and complain about having done so. There was something of a romance arc tucked into her story line, but I honestly think this book would have been stronger without that because it never felt relevant. Ben also seemed to have only two personality traits: his obsession with love and being generally mopey. His romance arc was also, basically, insta-love; and while there’s another reason I didn’t like his romance arc, that contains more significant spoilers, so I’m not going to cover that here. I have individual problems with all the characters, but on an overarching level, I think the key issue was that they were all quite one-dimensional and wooden; the story suffered immensely because of that.
Last on my list of complaints is an aspect that is more personal preference than anything else. I hated how everyone in this book seemed to view the horned boy in the glass coffin as an object. People make up stories about him like he's a doll, which is either uncomfortably weird if he's asleep or rather disturbing if he's dead. And both Ben and Hazel treated him like a possession—referring to him as theirs on multiple occasions. This behavior is never addressed and it left a rather bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t dock stars for it, but I definitely didn't like it and it made me dislike all of the associated characters even more than I otherwise would have.
All that said, after a certain point in the book, there’s an atmospheric shift. The plot goes from dragging itself along at a snail’s pace, to developing tension and engaging with the fae on a deeper level. If you were wondering why I gave a book that I’ve done nothing but complain about a 3-star rating, well … this is it.
In short, the ending of The Darkest Part of the Forest made the book worth reading. I blasted through the last third of this book in an hour after spending several weeks trying to push through the first two thirds. And, in the end, I was relatively satisfied with how the story resolved itself. It became more action-packed, the writing was tighter, and it felt altogether more fantastical.
So, there you go. I didn’t love all of it and I didn’t hate all of it, which somehow winds up looking a bit as though I generally liked it, when I can’t really claim to have done either.
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