"The Hazel Wood" by Melissa Albert

I LOVED the first half of this book. It tells the story of Alice Crewe, a 17-year-old student at a posh private high school in Manhattan. Alice hadn't always lived in a penthouse apartment, though. Life surrounded by snooty rich people was a recent development, and one that Alice wasn't entirely comfortable with. Before Alice's mother Ella married her rich stepfather Harold, mother and daughter had spent Alice's entire life moving from place to place, mooching off any friends they could find, until they overstayed their welcome and had to move on. Or, as Alice put it, until their bad luck caught up with them.

Alice didn't fully understand the reasons behind their itinerant lifestyle, though she knew it had something to do with her grandmother, Althea Proserpine, whom she had never met. Althea was the author of a book of fairy tales called Tales from the Hinterland. Book and author alike were surrounded by an air of mystery. The book had somehow become both very famous as well as extremely hard to find, and Alice had never read it. Even if she could have gotten her hands on a copy, she knew her mother wouldn't approve.

But one day Alice comes home to find that her mother has disappeared, and she doesn't know who to turn to. All she can think to do is travel to her grandmother's estate, The Hazel Wood--maybe there she will find clues that will lead her to her mother. She's joined by Ellery Finch, the closest thing to a friend that she has. It isn't long before bizarre fairy-tale circumstances start creeping into real life.

And up to this point, this was the best book I had read in a long time. The story hummed with energy. It was taut and tense. But it was exactly on page 199 that the book began to go wrong. It's like the thread was cut and the tension was lost and the story made all the sense of a dream. The thread that had been strung so tightly up until that point became a jumbled, tangled mess. I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy the rest of the book, but it was disappointing that it didn't live up to the expectations set by the first half.