Fantasy is my original genre love, but I haven’t been reading nearly as much of it as I used to. Not much has been clever enough to grab me. Thankfully, Melissa Albert is here to renew my interest with her creative and beautifully written take on a modern fairy tale.

Decades ago, Alice’s grandmother wrote a book called Tales From the Hinterland, a collection of short, dark original fairy tales that became a cult classic. It’s out of print and copies are hard to find – so hard to find that copies tend to go mysteriously missing or stolen, even once they’ve been acquired. Alice wants nothing to do with the book or its fans, until her mother is kidnapped by a group referring to themselves as the Hinterland. In order to find her mother, Alice must team up with a teenage boy who’s familiar with the stories. Together, they go looking for the Hinterland.

This book starts out completely realistically, as if it could be a contemporary story of a kidnapping and the intrepid teens who set out to solve it themselves. But there are early hints that the magic might be real – three ordinary objects left behind on a table that nonetheless indicate they are much more; a sighting of a woman on the street who looks normal but also strangely out of place in a way that’s difficult to explain; a readheaded man from a decade ago who hasn’t seemed to age. Figuring out how these elements all fit together makes for an enthralling, page-turning read.

The details are what make this story stand out. Albert sprinkles small excerpts and characters’ retellings of Tales From the Hinterland throughout her book, making the Tales seem real – like we as readers could hunt down a copy for ourselves, if were so (un)lucky. The tales themselves are lovely dark stories, inspired by Grimm and Perrault but still entirely Albert’s own thing. And every detail that Albert places in her story, aside from and complementary to the Tales, is important, too. They are clues to the larger mystery, the one beyond what happened to Alice’s mother: what the Tales really are and how much Alice’s story is intertwined with them.

This is a treat for any teen who loves contemporary fantasy, dark fantasy, retold fairy tales, and surprising endings. It’s skillfully plotted, beautifully written, and shows its influences clearly but still manages to be original and fresh. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by the publisher.