Breadcrumbs

redheadperson22 - Warning! This review contains spoilers! Hazel and Jack are best friends. But Jack starts acting weird, and ditches Hazel. Hazel is absolutely devastated. Then Jack goes missing, and Hazel sets out to find him. What I thought of it: I didn't get it. Hazel was just annoying. She was always complaining. She completely overreacted when Jack started being "mean" to her. She was really dependent on Jack, and I found that slightly creepy. I couldn't bring myself to really like her even a little bit. Hazel's mom was annoying too. She tried to shove Hazel into a friendship with some girl, and Hazel just went along with it. She didn't really seem concerned at all when Hazel was complaining about Jack's weird behavior. She basically just saw it as a chance for Hazel to just forget about him and make friends that are girls. The writing style was awful. It was very descriptive, and that got really old really fast. The author used a lot of metaphors that didn't really make sense. It was extremely annoying. The only 2 characters that I actually liked were Jack and that girls uncle. Jack seemed like a really cool guy. Hazel really didn't deserve him. The uncle was really awesome. I didn't understand how Jack's parents thought that he was visiting his aunt. Were they under a spell? It was extremely boring. The first part seemed like Realistic fiction, but the second part seemed like Fantasy. That really annoyed me. Hazel's trip through the woods was boring, and it seems like it would never end. She meets a lot of people, and none of them turn out to be how she thought they'd be. The moral of the story seemed to be that you can't REALLY be friends with someone of the opposite gender without complications, and that it's better to stick with friends that are the same gender because if you have a friend of the opposite gender it's inevitable that you'll drift apart. I thought that was down right stupid. I could barely finish reading this, and I thought about stopping and never finishing it because I didn't really care how it ended. I had high hopes for this book. I read a lot of reviews praising it for how wonderful it was. I honestly don't know why everyone loves this book, and thinks it's so beautiful. Overall I hated it. This one of the worst books I've read in a while. Which is why I had to review. I need to save people. There was one girl who I told how much I hated it and she said she wouldn't read it. Everyone who didn't like this book, review. We could be the superheroes of literature.

Starred review from August 29, 2011
Ursu follows her Cronus Chronicles
trilogy with this deeply felt, modern-day fantasy that borrows plot from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Richly imaginative fifth-grader Hazel, adopted from India, has recently switched schools and is failing (badly) to fit in. Money is tight, her parents have divorced, and her best friend, Jack, suddenly rebuffs her. Hazel is devastated, but readers learn the cause of Jack’s alienation is a shard of magical mirror lodged in his heart. When Jack disappears with an ethereal woman on a sled pulled by wolves, Hazel heads into the wintry and enchanted Minnesota woods to rescue him. A sadness as heavy as a Northwoods snowfall pervades this story, though it has its delights, too. Ursu offers many winks at avid fans of fairy tales and fantasy (Jack’s mother looks “like someone had severed her daemon”). The creepy fantasyland that Hazel traverses uses bits from other Andersen tales to create a story that, though melancholy, is beautifully written and wholly original. It’s certainly the only children’s fantasy around where Minnesota Twins All-Star catcher Joe Mauer figures into the plot. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8–12.

Starred review from July 15, 2011

In this contemporary version of The Snow Queen, fifth-grader Hazel embarks on a memorable journey into the Minnesota woods to find her best friend Jack, who vanishes after a shard of glass pierces his eye.

Adopted from India as a baby, fantasy maven Hazel has always felt "she was from a different planet." Hazel tries "desperately not to disturb the universe" at Lovelace Elementary, where she doesn't fit in with anyone except Jack, the only person she knows with a real imagination. Together they've grown out of "Wonderland Arctic space-people tea parties" into "superhero baseball"—until the day Hazel pelts Jack with a snowball, glass enters his eye and he disappears with a mysterious woman resembling the Snow Queen. Uncertain if Jack's really changed or something fey's afoot, Hazel enters the woods to find "an entirely different place," populated by creatures from the pages of Hans Christian Andersen. As Hazel discovers she doesn't know the ground rules, the third-person narrator engages readers with asides and inter-textual references from the fairy-tale canon. And like a fairy-tale heroine, Hazel traverses the woods without a breadcrumb trail to save a boy who may not want to be saved in this multi-layered, artfully crafted, transforming testament to the power of friendship.

More than just a good story, this will appeal to lovers of Cornelia Funke as well as Andersen. (Fantasy. 8-12)

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from November 1, 2011

Gr 5-8-Hazel Anderson's 10-year-old world is teetering on the unsteady foundation of her parents' separation, as she is now at a new school where she feels like an outsider, both as a dreamer and as an adoptee from South Asia. She is bullied and misunderstood, and her best friend, Jack, is spending more time with his male friends than with her. When a demon drops a shard of an enchanted mirror into his eye and he becomes drugged and manic under its influence, he accompanies the Snow Queen into the woods. During her search for him, Hazel's realistic world collides with surreal fantasy and she is thrown into the eerie, threatening woods of broken and transformed fairy tales. She encounters shadowy threats in the form of creepy, unscrupulous adults who have their own agendas and victims: a girl ensnared in the body of a bird, and children trapped as flowers. Hazel's challenge consists largely in persisting in her quest to rescue Jack despite her insecurity about their friendship and the lack of a breadcrumb path in a confusing world. Unlike the triumphant ending of Andersen's "Snow Queen," Hazel's rescue of Jack and its aftermath is realistically bittersweet. Jack is who he is, a boy who is growing away from her. It is Hazel who is changed by her experience, and who learns to approach her life with positive energy. Although this is a fantasy, its grounding in psychological realism and focus on Hazel's feelings makes it a fine choice for readers who prefer realistic fiction. Ursu's multilayered, dreamlike story stands out from the fantasy/quest pack.-Sue Giffard, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, New York City

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2011
Grades 4-6 Hazel, a fifth-grader who lives with her divorced mother, isn't adjusting well to her new school. Worse, her one dependable friendship, with her next-door-neighbor Jack, has become unstable. When glass falls from the sky and into Jack's eye, its source is a mystery, but readers are told that a shard of magic mirror, shattered by a goblin high above the earth, caused the injury. Soon afterward, a white witch lures him to a frozen pond, where he lives while Hazel braves the terrors of the magic woods to rescue him. Mixing realistic and fantastic realms is a chancy endeavor, but Ursu draws readers into lonely Hazel's world and makes her quest a compelling story. Throughout the text are allusions to fairy tales, principally Andersen's The Snow Queen, as well as classic and contemporary children's books. These allusions will enrich the narrative in proportion to the reader's knowledge of the originals. This fantasy features polished prose, a carefully crafted story, and a hauntingly beautiful dust jacket.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)