Book content warnings: dead rabbits (frequent), killing rabbits for ritual magic (infrequent).

"Once upon a time there was a mother and the daughter who loved her. But the truth swept the scales from the girl's eyes. The mother could not bear to see the truth of herself in her daughter's face, so she stole it away."

A wonderful, complicated tale of adolescence, friendships, and the often turbulent relationship between mother and daughter. A tale where the line between right and wrong is blurred, where unforgivable wrongs can in many ways be almost understood.

A dark YA read that will be enjoyable for young adults and older adults alike, especially those millennials who fondly remember movies and TV shows such as The Craft or Charmed.

Ivy is 17. Summer break is just starting, and the weeks ahead should have been filled with friends and summer fun. Instead it begins with a naked woman in the road in the middle of the night, a breakup with her boyfriend, and continues with a string of events that only get stranger and more foreboding as the days pass. And all of it points to one conclusion: Ivy's mother isn't everything she says she is.

And maybe Ivy knows more than she realises.

The story weaves between Ivy in the present day and her mother, Dana, 20 years in the past. When a rebellious older teen befriends sixteen-year-old Dana and her best friend, the trio discover a whole world of magical possibilities is within their reach, and that for some of them, ambition knows no bounds.

"Think of it: sixteen and brimming with power, after being told all your life you were powerless..."

Thank you, NetGalley, for letting me read this.

Well, you just know right from the start that you are in skilled hands. The story crosses the lives of two women - mother and daughter - and shows you how the actions of Dana at 17 come back to haunt her own life, and that of Ivy, her daughter - at much the same age.

There's teenage stuff here - managing relationships, mother and daughter stuff - and then there's the darker, magic stuff. It's so well woven, so well told. I just devoured it. These are complex characters; we get to know them and understand them as the story unfolds. There's no black and white, just agonising choices, people doing their best, and then trying to live with their decisions.

It's so good.

Our Crooked Hearts has the deliciously creepy and dark atmosphere I associate with Melissa Albert’s writing voice. This novel brought to life a world of magic, tantalising and full of wonder, as well as cruel and rife with devastating costs. It is both steeped in the eager joy of shared secrets by the innocent and warped by powerful greed.

Melissa has treated readers to her own skilled magic within the pages of this story, divulged in more than one voice and across more than one time line. While this may sound ambitious to some, it actually teased the story along at a steady pace, increasing the tension with every page.

I struggle to put the entire premise of this book into a short blurb, while still doing it justice, so I share the publisher’s:

“Ivy's summer kicks off with a series of disturbing events. As unnatural offerings appear on her doorstep, she's haunted by fragmented memories from her childhood, suggesting there's more to her mother, Dana, than meets the eye.

Dana's tale starts the year she turns sixteen, when she embarks on a major fling with the supernatural. Too late she realizes that the powers she's playing with are also playing with her.

Years after it began, Ivy and Dana's shared story will come down to a reckoning between a mother, a daughter and the dark forces they never should have messed with.”

Thank you to the publisher, Penguin Random House Children’s UK, and Netgalley for granting me a free copy of this novel in exchange for my impartial review. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

This book has a UK release date of 22 June 2022 and I urge like minded readers to pre-order without delay.

I did not expect to really enjoy this, as I am not one for typical 'teen witchy thing', but this book pulled me in from the start. I will admit to not liking the main character much, though that changes towards the end of the book. I loved the story, and all the twists and turns we are led down, with things that are not as obvious from the start, I did enjoy Melissa Alberts writing style, it was easy and full of fun prose. I look forward to there being a sequel to this.

Our Crooked Hearts

This is a dark book, but I found it really interesting. I liked the themes of witches and black magic.
The story draws you in from the first chapter, and makes you forget that there is a world outside the book.

I absolutely loved this book and read the entire thing in under 24 hours - with a break to actually sleep. I thought the pacing was excellent and really enjoyed the flipping between current day events and events from the mothers teenage years which occurred until near the end when the previous and current timelines joined up. I love books with magic in them but what actually really struck me about Our Crooked Hearts was the relationship between Ivy and her mother and how it showed the humanity and failure of her as a mother as well as the love. I also thought the villain of the piece was really well portrayed, arguably there's more than one villain depending on how you choose to look at it - that shade of grey in regards to the age old good v evil trope works perfectly.

This is a haunting, dark, and utterly brilliant book about witches and black magic. I was completely absorbed in the story from the very beginning. The duel timeline / view points really add to the wonders and horror throughout the book.

A fine tale of witches, secrets and revenge. Lovely stuff.

Life starts to go wrong for seventeen-year-old Ivy when she and her boyfriend almost run down a naked woman. When dead rabbits start to appear on her doorstep she knows something is happening. Then her mother disappears, and things really start to unravel.

And so we launch into a fast-moving and shock-laden story of family, witchcraft, secrets and revenge. A heady mix for so-called Young Adult fiction. It's a term I really dislike. Many of the best books I, (62 year old male), have read recently have been designated YA. Why? A good story is a good story.

Now for my ongoing gripe. This book happens in two time periods = the present, and some twenty years ago, when Ivy's mother Dana and her friends discover the power than witchcraft offers. So many books now seem to favour the dual timeline format, and I suppose I need to accept this is a necessary tool authors use to slowly reveal elements which will finally dovetail into the story's climax. But I'll never be a fan.

In this case the past story reveals how Dana and her friends discover a book of witchcraft which allows them to cast increasingly complex spells, culminating in a summoning spell that goes wrong. It's the result of this spell that cascades down the years to fall on Ivy and her friends.

I really liked this book. It moves along at a pace, and the characters are well fleshed out, and it's easy to feel Ivy's frustration as she learns more about her mother's past, as well as her own. The story takes a few surprise twists, as we're slowly drawn into the deeper story. As Ivy begins to fight back, thing really start to move and I really did want to keep reading just one more chapter.

I was lucky enough to score a Netgalley ARC, but I'll be eagerly waiting to read the book again when it's published. Definitely recommended for fan of VA Schwab, Ben Aaronvitch and Naomi Novik.