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.
Character Analysis
Alice Proserpine (Alice Crewe)
Alice is a high school senior at the novel’s opening and the protagonist of the narrative. She relates the story in first-person point of view. She attends a prestigious and private high school; her tuition is paid by her stepfather. The assumption is that her stepfather will pay for her college education as well. We learn very little about what kind of a student Alice is or how much she likes or doesn’t like school. Before her residence at Harold’s wealthy apartment, she and her mother Ella lived a transitory lifestyle, spending weeks to months in apartments or bungalows of Ella’s friends and acquaintances. They pick up and move to a new place and school each time a bout of bad luck finds them. By the story’s end, Alice comes to know that her great fear—that the bad luck follows her, not Ella—is true: The bad luck is actually the work of Hinterland characters who want Alice to return to the Hinterland. Ella took Alice, a Story (character in a Hinterland tale), as a baby and raised her as her own daughter. Alice, consequently, is two characters in one: She is the fairy tale character Alice-Three-Times from the tale of the same name, and she is the 17-year-old girl who wants to get her mother Ella back.
Alice-Three-Times is born to a king and queen and becomes an impish, mischievous, and fear-inducing girl. She shows little empathy toward others and a strong desire to play tricks on and get even with her siblings. When her ice challenge—she says she will marry the suitor who can bring her ice from a distant land—is won by two brothers, she swallows the ice; after, she is stiff, cold, and capable of killing. In The Hazel Wood, Janet, Ella, and Finch do not reveal the end of “Alice-Three-Times,” so Alice never learns how her character’s story turns out before she successfully defeats the story with help from the redhaired man, Janet, and Finch.
Though Alice shows she is capable of love, regret, and forgiveness, her dominating trait is her quick temper. Her dialogue and interior monologue show moments of sarcasm and snarkiness, especially with Audrey and Harold. She demonstrates flares of fury that she must coach herself down from. For example, she almost insults Audrey with a scathingly cruel remark but manages to hold back with strategies Ella taught her over the years. She does not hold back, however, when a policeman irritates her on the way to try to find the Hazel Wood. She suspects for a moment he is Hinterland; when that cannot be proved, and Finch lectures her on her sarcastic comments to the policeman, her fury grows out of control and she purposefully steers them off the road and almost into a tree. When she becomes an ex-Story, the loss of the anger is so complete, Alice feels lost and unlike herself. However, with Ella’s help, and by attending a support group of fellow ex-Stories, Alice slowly re-acclimates to the real world.
Ella Proserpine
As Alice eventually learns, Ella, Althea Proserpine’s daughter, took baby Alice from the Halfway Woods and fled her mother’s and the Hinterland’s influence. After living largely as a recluse with Althea for her formative years in the Hazel Wood, Ella believed she was doing the baby a kind service. Alice’s eyes lost their black after Ella rescued her, so Ella thought her actions were vindicated. Hinterland characters pursue Ella and Alice in their nomad-like existence, but Ella tells Alice they are simply dogged by bad luck. Althea’s supposed death causes Ella to take a chance on a more stable life married to Harold; she hopes to send Alice to college, but she is taken by the Briar King as bait to prompt Alice to seek passage to the Hinterland. Ella is eccentric and self-confident; she takes jobs by necessity as they move from place to place. Ella is devoted to Alice and determined to keep her safe. She coaches Alice to calm her anger, and when Alice returns from the Hinterland, Ella tries to soothe her fears and ease her difficulties with accepting her identity and new life as an ex-Story.
Althea Proserpine
Althea met Janet on a trip to Europe in the 1960s and accompanied her to the Hinterland; once there, she investigated the Stories like a “war reporter,” following their plotlines as they spun out and interviewing secondary characters. After striking a deal with the Story Spinner to return, Althea published the stories as her own, inadvertently causing more bridges between the Hinterland and her world. Most of what readers learn of Althea is via indirect characterization through Ella’s comments and much later, Janet’s story. It is difficult to assess Althea’s true character traits from Alice’s brief interaction with her at the Hazel Wood; dream and reality are so intermixed there that Alice cannot be sure she gets an accurate image of Althea. Her dominating character traits in that scene as well as in conversations about her are curiosity, arrogance, fickleness, and a measure of regret.
Ellery Finch
Ellery is an Ally and potential love interest to Alice for much of the first part of the book. His curious interest in Althea’s book drives Alice to seek his help when Ella is taken, and his wealth, support, connections, and advice help Alice get to Birch, New York, near enough to the Halfway Wood to be drawn into it by Twice-Killed Katherine. Finch becomes a Shapeshifter, however, once he and Alice leave the rare book dealer’s shop in their search for a copy of Tales from the Hinterland. He betrays Alice’s trust at that point, and while she is passed out, he agrees to work for the Hinterland. The Hinterland cab driver slits Finch’s throat when Alice will not quickly acquiesce to killing herself, but he is healed by refugees in the Hinterland. Finch is instrumental in saving Alice from her Story but chooses to stay in the alternate realm of the Hinterland when she opts to return to New York.
Harold
Harold is the wealthy man Ella marries. They are mutually incompatible from early on in the marriage; Alice overhears his insulting comments and tone when he and Ella argue and tries to intercede. Harold is traumatized when the Hinterland characters abduct him, Ella, and Audrey, but he is unconcerned for Ella’s and Alice’s safety. Instead, he threatens Alice when she tries to return to the apartment and wants nothing further to do with Ella or Alice, blaming them entirely for the appearance of the Hinterland.
Audrey
Audrey is Harold’s daughter from a previous marriage. She is cool, slightly insensitive, popular at school, and dismissive of the marriage trouble between Ella and Harold. She and Alice uneasily joke together about Ella’s “gold digging” and try to one-up each other with sarcastic comments regarding Audrey’s wealth and Alice’s poverty. A truer picture of Audrey evolves after the Hinterland characters abduct her and Harold: Wanting to help Alice, she tries to keep Harold at bay in order to tell Alice what happened and what she observed about Ella. At the book’s conclusion, a brief scene between Alice and Audrey reveals that Audrey thought Alice was scary but now sees a much gentler Alice. The two part ways amicably.
Janet
Janet is a helper and mentor to refugees from the real world arrived in the Hinterland. She explains how things exist and work there and warns refugees of the dangers. Once she hears that Alice is kin to Althea, she shares the personal backstory that connected Althea to the Hinterland: The two fell in love in Europe when Janet was searching for literal doors to new worlds, and they journeyed to the Hinterland together. Janet exhibits some bitterness and wryness that Althea left her behind to return to New York. Janet explains to Alice how Althea’s actions caused the two worlds to fuse, assists in freeing Alice from her Story, and suggests Alice attend a therapy group for ex-Stories and ex-refugees. Because of her consistent help toward Alice, she is a significant mentor in Alice’s story.
The Story Spinner
The Story Spinner is a character in the novel’s Hinterland scenes. As she tricks Alice into returning to “Alice-Three-Times” and then actively attempts to defeat Alice’s intention to change and therefore end the Story, the Story Spinner is a shadow archetype (someone who works against the protagonist). The Story Spinner serves as an allegorical entity as well, symbolizing the manner in which all stories are created and told. She considers herself someone who keeps out of direct involvement with the stories once they are set in motion. Her role, according to the Spinner herself, is to keep story threads from tangling. The Spinner, however, certainly becomes an active participant in “Alice-Three-Times” when the redhaired younger brother and Alice attempt to change the story; her spider-spinners go to work, and Alice can actually see the holes and mends in the fabric of the story as the Spinner succeeds repeatedly in ensuring its continuation. Alice can only defeat the Spinner by beating her at her own game: Alice tells a new story for herself. The Spinner is very passive when Alice confronts her after the destruction of “Alice-Three-Times.”
