3.5
Our Crooked Hearts Book Cover Our Crooked Hearts
Melissa Albert
Young Adult
Flatiron Books
06/28/22
Hardcover, Ebook, Audible
352

The suburbs, right now.... Seventeen-year-old Ivy’s summer break kicks off with an accident, a punishment, and a mystery: a stranger whose appearance in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, heralds a string of increasingly unsettling events. As the days pass, Ivy grapples with eerie offerings, corroded memories, and a secret she’s always known - that there's more to her mother than meets the eye. The city, back then.... Dana has always been perceptive. And the summer she turns 16, with the help of her best friend and an ambitious older girl, her gifts bloom into a heady fling with the supernatural. As the trio’s aspirations darken, they find themselves speeding toward a violent breaking point. Years after it began, Ivy and Dana's shared story will come down to a reckoning among a daughter, a mother, and the dark forces they never should’ve messed with.

“There was a quiet place at the center of me. A pool of black water frozen to a sheen. It was made up of the questions it was easier not to ask, the mysteries I didn’t bother prodding. I’d been letting it thicken as far back as I could recall. Something was moving beneath the ice now. Shifting, making the surface creak, turning it rotten.”

Writing Style

Melissa Albert weaves a very dark, magical story. First she coaxes you in with expert word play and lyrical descriptions worthy of a poet. Then, when you’re least expecting it, like the crafty wordsmith she is, you soon find yourself ensnared in her web and left incapable of escape. You’re her prisoner, her next meal, stuck until she chooses to release you.

“From up here I could see we were small, we were specks, we were cosmic dust off a god’s left shoulder, and the discovery filled me with an electric joy. The air was thin and the stars sang their elliptical starsong and didn’t care that I heard it.”

Our Crooked Hearts is told in dual (sometimes tri) POVs and dual timelines. Initially, the separate timelines and narrators felt too separate; I couldn’t tell the purpose of being told the two stories on their own. Why wouldn’t they be weaved together? There had to be a reason. There was a reason, but readers don’t get there until Part Two so stick with it.

“We didn’t wonder where the magic came from, or why it worked. We never asked ourselves, Is this ours to take? We were three damp ducklings, green as leaves, believing with all our crooked hearts that we were the ones writing this story.”

Feels

Friends, I’m not going to lie to you. Our Crooked Hearts started exceptionally slow for me, and there was a point about 30% in that I considered DNF’ing. I’m really glad that I didn’t, though. I am impatient. I hope to be drawn in immediately with action or witty dialogue and banter, but not all novels are like that and that’s why I think it’s important to read from all genres. It was difficult at the beginning of the story for me to see where it was headed, but soon I felt the pull and couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

Melissa Albert expertly laid the foundation for the final acts, done in such a way that once you’ve finished you want to go back to the beginning to discover those clues you missed the first time around. 

Final Thoughts

Our Crooked Hearts is perfect for fans of Holly Black and V. E. Schwab. It is subtle, creepy, and gives off some sketchy vibes that will at times make you want to hide behind your hands and read through your fingers. The story takes some time to build up so be patient. I’ll be thinking about Ivy, Marion, Dana, and Fee for a long time to come. 

If you love fantasy, don’t miss Leah’s review of “A Mirror Mended”. Leah loved it and we think you will, too!