48 pages • 1 hour read
Melissa AlbertThe Hazel Wood
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
This chapter is Finch’s telling of “The Door That Wasn’t There.” Anya and Lisbet are two sisters who live in the Hinterland. A year separates them in age. Their father is a merchant who travels on long journeys, and their mother is emotionally distant, locking herself into a room in their house often. Once, the mother locks herself away for three days; when they finally break through the door, she is gone; a puddle of blood and a dagger made of bone lie on the floor. After many months, the father returns with a new wife. When the father starts traveling again, the stepmother takes to locking the girls in the bloodstained room and going away for hours at a time. Eventually, she locks the girls in with the intention of never returning; after three days Anya sees through the window the servants leaving and knows that she and Lisbet will die locked in the room.
In the night, the bloodstain tells her to make the outline of a door in blood and say a spell. Anya, terrified to spill her own blood, says they must use Lisbet’s. She draws the door, casts the spell, and opens a door into the land of Death. Lisbet dies from loss of blood, and Anya carries her through and buries her. Everything in the Death realm is sick or dying: “The branches of trees had become slender bones, and the dust of the road was crackling ashes” (168). Anya wanders, and years pass; she cannot eat, drink, or die. The voice speaks to her again, as it did through the bloodstain, telling her how to return to the land of the living. A tree grew where Lisbet lay buried; walnuts from the tree crack open to reveal a dress and shoes along with a magical stone that acts as an eye to the living world. Through it, Anya sees her father, a new wife, and their son, now her age, living in their home. The boy can see her when she gazes though the stone, though others cannot; Anya whispers for the boy to use his blood to draw a door and come through to meet her. He does, but she slips out; Death allows her to go because she exchanged a soul for her own. Back in the Hinterland, Anya cuts the new wife’s throat and leaves the seeing stone for the father to find, so that he can view the son he can never rescue.
Chapter 17 Summary
When Finch finishes the story, Alice thinks she sees a strange white line in the trees out the car window. The sight causes a memory from a stay in Chicago with Ella to surface, but she recalls only hazy images of falling, blood, fear, and running away without packing any bags. She drives after a rest stop. After a while, they approach an accident on the road. A policeman stops them and tells Alice to turn around and go another way. Immediately suspicious of the Hinterland, she angrily mouths off to the officer. Finch tells her to calm down, and they leave. Finch and Alice argue about her attitude, and Alice gets so angry that she purposefully steers them off the road, almost hitting a tree before yanking the wheel back toward the road. Alice regrets her tantrum and impetuous behavior; Finch guilt trips her: “How are you gonna convince me you won’t try to kill us again?” (179). At a motel, Alice tries to apologize, but Finch seems exhausted and wants to sleep.
Chapter 18 Summary
Finch has a nightmare, and his vocalizations wake Alice. She wakes him; he seems sad and questions her about saving her mother, eventually seeming to understand that she would “die in pursuit of Ella” (187). Alice realizes she has come to care about Finch.
The next morning, Finch tells Alice she was talking in her sleep but will not detail the topics. They take turns showering and dressing. Alice reveals that her hair is “total Disney hair” (188), thick and yellow; she keeps it short ever since a teacher harassed her by calling her a “pretty little house cat” (188). Going out to the rental car, they discover that it is filled with seawater. Alice opens the door, and murky water spills in a flood; a live fish suffocates in the parking lot. The desk clerk of the hotel says they can walk a mile to catch a bus to Nike, near Birch. They hurry down the road to make the bus. Finch is in a strange mood full of wonderment; he comments on the seawater in the car. He confesses that Alice referred to a feather, a comb, and a bone that morning in her sleep, but she fibs and says she doesn’t understand what that could mean.
They make the bus. Finch falls asleep. Alice pulls the feather, comb, and bone from her bag and puts them in her jeans pocket. On the bus radio, a song includes the same lines Ness told Alice: “Look until the leaves turn red/ Sew the worlds up with thread/ If your journey’s left undone/ Fear the rising of the sun” (197). Alice memorizes the lines.
Chapter 19 Summary
As soon as they arrive, Alice suspects something is up with Finch. He asks the driver if the bus will return right away; he stands too close to her, making her jump; finally he admits, “I messed up” (200). He hedges without coming clean. Alice sees the Hinterland cab driver and Twice-Killed Katherine in the yellow cab nearby. Finch admits he has been working for them since Alice passed out at the rare book dealer’s shop. He agreed to get her close to the Hazel Wood. The boy and Katherine mock Alice, Katherine calling her a “house cat”; Alice slaps her. The touch of Katherine’s face causes a burning feeling in Alice’s hand and arm.
They try to run, but the land underfoot seems to buckle and reverse, and they end up back in front of the boy and Katherine. They strangely offer Alice a knife and try to convince her to kill herself. Alice realizes that Katherine feels pain and fear from the slap and asks if they are scared of her. Katherine replies, “Scared? […] Of you? […] All you’re good for now is to spill your blood and make us a damned door. Now kill yourself, or he gets it and your mother next” (207). Alice lunges at her, and Katherine kicks the knife to the boy. At Katherine’s directive, the boy slices Finch’s throat open. Katherine blames Alice and tells her she will die that night. They open a greenish-outlined hole in the air and carry Finch’s body through; Katherine sends her bird to attack Alice, and Alice falls into a “numb black sea” (209).
Chapter 20 Summary
Alice has a brief flashback to a time when she was six and riding in the car with Ella at the wheel. Ella is humming a song she calls a nursery rhyme. Alice asks her if she liked to read when she was young, and Ella replies that she enjoyed “everything but fairy tales” (212). Alice comes out of this dreamy flashback when Twice-Killed Katherine slaps her, instructing her to wake. Katherine tells her, “You’re here,” and Alice looks around for the Hazel Wood; it turns out, however, that Alice is in what Katherine calls the Halfway Wood. Katherine gets in the cab, and it rushes away into the trees, leaving Alice in a circular clearing alone.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
This section of chapters marks the transition from Alice’s real world to that of her grandmother’s Hinterland; as she remarks in interior monologue at the conclusion of Chapter 20, “That was when I entered a fairy tale” (214). Several important and symbolic events happen as precursors to this moment, and each one leans toward an iconic or archetypal moment of preparation often completed or withstood by the hero in a classic journey story or a traditional fairy tale or myth. For example, Alice loses control of her temper and steers off the road, coming close to death. At the last moment, she manages to save herself and Finch; she then expresses regret. Regret reminds Alice that she must contend with her “tragic flaw,” a trait of many questing heroes; Alice’s is her anger. Next, their car is destroyed in a supernatural, unexpected way, throwing a wrench in their plans and forcing them to think and act spontaneously; tangential paths and unexpected problems plague heroes in classic stories. On the bus, she hears the lines of verse again and instinctively memorizes them; often a rune, spell, or verse holds some kind of secret, riddle, or important instructions for the hero on his or her journey. Also on the bus, Alice brings her magic totems—the feather, the comb, and the bone—closer to herself when she moves them from her bag to her pocket. This symbolic moment of acceptance represents Alice’s willingness to bear the magical objects in preparation for the dangers ahead.
The biggest and most iconic preparatory step for the final journey in this section of chapters is the death of Finch. Heroes often lose their sidekick, ally, or mentor at a crucial stage in the quest, forcing them to go on alone or without the help of that entity whom they have come to trust, rely upon, and often love. Parallel examples in pop culture include Luke’s loss of mentors Obi-Wan and Yoda (in their physical forms) at important steps in his epic journey toward becoming a Jedi Knight and Master in the Star Wars saga, and Atreyu’s loss of his horse, Artax, in the Swamps of Sadness in The Neverending Story. In these plotlines, Luke and Atreyu must rally their courage and continue on; Alice must do the same as she wakes in the Halfway Wood. It is notable that Finch’s manner of death (blood loss) parallels the ally’s death in the dark Hinterland tale that leads this section of chapters: Lisbet’s in “The Door That Wasn’t There.” An accompanying comparison can be made between hero Anya, who directly caused Lisbet to bleed to death, and Alice, whom Twice-Killed Katherine blames for Finch’s death.
