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There are books you enjoy and that you admire And then there are books that crawl beneath your skin, wrap thorned vines around your ribs and refuse to leave long after you’ve turned the final page Hazelthorn belongs firmly in that last category. After falling completely in love with Don’t Let the Forest In, my expectations for this book were impossibly high. Somehow, C.G. Drews didn’t just meet them, they shattered them. What I found inside Hazelthorn was a story more haunting, more intimate and somehow even more devastating than I anticipated This is gothic horror at its finest: a crumbling estate filled with secrets, a forbidden garden that seems to breathe and hunger, locked doors, missing memories, family betrayals and something monstrous lurking just beyond understanding. Yet beneath all of that, this is a story about loneliness. About trauma. About being made to feel monstrous and desperately searching for someone who will see you anyway From the moment we meet Evander, my heart belonged to him A seventeen-year-old boy who has spent years confined to a room. Drugged, isolated, bruised and forgotten. A boy who wakes each morning unable to trust his own memories. A boy who has been told, directly and indirectly, that he is difficult, strange aswell as inconvenient His loneliness saturates every page. Not the quiet loneliness of solitude, but the aching loneliness of being unseen “He wishes he wasn’t like this, wishes he could stand even parallel to normal and be someone who fits next to those his age.” The autism representation throughout this novel resonated deeply with me. Evander’s experiences, his sensory struggles, his frustration with a world that seems designed for everyone except him and his desperate attempts to understand himself felt incredibly powerful. Drews captures autistic rage, confusion, isolation and longing with such care that many scenes felt almost painfully intimate Then there’s Laurie. God. Laurie The boy Evander has every reason to hate. The boy he can’t stop thinking about. The boy who exists somewhere between wound and remedy. At first glance, Laurie appears sharp-edged and impossible to trust. He hides behind sarcasm and cruelty, presenting himself as someone untouchable. Yet beneath that mask lies a vulnerability so raw that every glimpse of it felt like uncovering buried treasure. “Laurie has buried the vulnerable truth of himself as deep as he can, leaving only this insolent mask for everyone to see.” What unfolds between Laurie and Evander isn’t a simple romance. It is obsession. Grief. Understanding. Fury and Devotion at once It’s the kind of relationship that feels inevitable even while it’s tearing itself apart. Every interaction crackled with tension. Every glance felt loaded with years of pain and unanswered questions. Watching them slowly uncover the truth about each other became just as compelling as unraveling the mystery surrounding Hazelthorn itself The yearning in this book should honestly be studied “There is nothing else to me but the hollow spaces I’ve carved out for you. I knew I’d cut myself to pieces on you if we ever had the chance to touch, but I wanted to.” How am I supposed to recover from that? Or this: “I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours.” The romance isn’t soft or easy. It’s desperate and consuming (literally) It feels like standing too close to a fire and knowing you’re going to get burned but stepping closer anyway One of my absolute favorite elements of the novel was the way Greek mythology is woven throughout the story. As someone who immediately falls in love with any well-placed mythology reference, these moments completely captivated me “Perhaps he is Ariadne and behind one of these walls is the minotaur.” That line perfectly captures the feeling of Hazelthorn. The estate itself becomes a labyrinth. Every hallway twists toward another secret. Every locked room conceals another horror. Evander spends much of the story searching for a thread that might lead him toward the truth, never knowing what monster waits at the center And then there was the quote that utterly destroyed me in it’s own way: “He is Icarus with wings of swan feathers, who chose to fly into the sun because it looked like a pretty boy.” I genuinely had to stop reading for a moment. Because that is Laurie and Evander. Not simply two people falling in love. Two people choosing each other despite knowing it might ruin them. A willingness to burn if it means reaching something beautiful The mythology references don’t merely decorate the prose, they deepen the emotional core of the story, transforming longing into something ancient and tragic Speaking of prose, C.G. Drews continues to write some of the most stunning sentences I’ve encountered in YA fiction Every page overflows with imagery The descriptions are lush without becoming overwhelming. Poetic without sacrificing clarity The writing doesn’t simply describe the horror. It becomes the horror. Roots twist through flesh. Flowers bloom where they shouldn’t. Bodies become gardens. The line between beauty and monstrosity dissolves until they’re impossible to separate The botanical horror is phenomenal! I’ve read horror before. I’ve read gothic fiction before. I’ve never quite read anything that felt like this (their works generally) The garden is alive in every sense of the word. It pulses beneath the narrative like a second heartbeat, growing increasingly sinister as the story unfolds. Each revelation made me simultaneously desperate to keep reading and terrified of what I’d discover next. And then there’s the mystery The mystery absolutely consumed me Every answer generated three more questions. Then every revelation forced me to reconsider everything I’d previously assumed. The final third of this novel had me gripping the book with white knuckles. The tension becomes almost unbearable as secrets emerge, alliances shift and the true nature of Hazelthorn begins to reveal itself Several times I thought I’d figured everything out and several times I was wrong The deeper the story descended into madness, the more impossible it became to look away. What impressed me most, however, was how seamlessly Drews balances genres. Hazelthorn is gothic horror. It’s also a murder mystery. It’s psychological suspense too. It’s body horror here and there aswell. It’s a deeply emotional character study and an aching queer romance. Rather than competing with one another, these elements intertwine, strengthening every aspect of the narrative And at the center of it all lies one devastating truth: “I’m only a monster because they made me monstrous.” Hazelthorn is ultimately about people who have been wounded so deeply that they’ve begun to believe those wounds define them. It’s about the devastating consequences of abuse, neglect, and isolation. It’s about learning that being different does not make you broken. It’s about finding someone who looks directly at the ugliest, most frightened parts of you and stays Some quotes will be living in my head forever: “Pain is meant to take up space or else we wouldn’t know how to scream.” “What if the worst of us is the only part that’s real?” “He belongs to this boy in the way a flower belongs to its god.” I highlighted so many passages that my copy practically became a second garden of annotations By the time I reached the ending, I was emotionally wrecked The final pages landed with extraordinary force, reframing everything that came before while simultaneously breaking my heart. Then came the author’s note, and suddenly tears were burning behind my eyes. I finished the book and simply sat there No scrolling No starting another novel Just sitting (and texting my best friend that got me to read it…) Thinking about Evander Thinking about Laurie about gardens and monsters and loneliness and love, how some stories don’t end when you close the cover. They linger, fester and finally they bloom For those who have ever felt out of place, those the ones who have been made to feel monstrous and also for everyone who have spent their lives searching for someone who might understand them. Read Hazelthorn! Once the garden has a taste, it wants the rest And honestly I don’t think I ever want to escape its grasp
Jun 25, 2026
There are books you enjoy and that you admire And then there are books that crawl beneath your skin, wrap thorned vines around your ribs and refuse to leave long after you’ve turned the final page Hazelthorn belongs firmly in that last category. After falling completely in love with Don’t Let the Forest In, my expectations for this book were impossibly high. Somehow, C.G. Drews didn’t just meet them, they shattered them. What I found inside Hazelthorn was a story more haunting, more intimate and somehow even more devastating than I anticipated This is gothic horror at its finest: a crumbling estate filled with secrets, a forbidden garden that seems to breathe and hunger, locked doors, missing memories, family betrayals and something monstrous lurking just beyond understanding. Yet beneath all of that, this is a story about loneliness. About trauma. About being made to feel monstrous and desperately searching for someone who will see you anyway From the moment we meet Evander, my heart belonged to him A seventeen-year-old boy who has spent years confined to a room. Drugged, isolated, bruised and forgotten. A boy who wakes each morning unable to trust his own memories. A boy who has been told, directly and indirectly, that he is difficult, strange aswell as inconvenient His loneliness saturates every page. Not the quiet loneliness of solitude, but the aching loneliness of being unseen “He wishes he wasn’t like this, wishes he could stand even parallel to normal and be someone who fits next to those his age.” The autism representation throughout this novel resonated deeply with me. Evander’s experiences, his sensory struggles, his frustration with a world that seems designed for everyone except him and his desperate attempts to understand himself felt incredibly powerful. Drews captures autistic rage, confusion, isolation and longing with such care that many scenes felt almost painfully intimate Then there’s Laurie. God. Laurie The boy Evander has every reason to hate. The boy he can’t stop thinking about. The boy who exists somewhere between wound and remedy. At first glance, Laurie appears sharp-edged and impossible to trust. He hides behind sarcasm and cruelty, presenting himself as someone untouchable. Yet beneath that mask lies a vulnerability so raw that every glimpse of it felt like uncovering buried treasure. “Laurie has buried the vulnerable truth of himself as deep as he can, leaving only this insolent mask for everyone to see.” What unfolds between Laurie and Evander isn’t a simple romance. It is obsession. Grief. Understanding. Fury and Devotion at once It’s the kind of relationship that feels inevitable even while it’s tearing itself apart. Every interaction crackled with tension. Every glance felt loaded with years of pain and unanswered questions. Watching them slowly uncover the truth about each other became just as compelling as unraveling the mystery surrounding Hazelthorn itself The yearning in this book should honestly be studied “There is nothing else to me but the hollow spaces I’ve carved out for you. I knew I’d cut myself to pieces on you if we ever had the chance to touch, but I wanted to.” How am I supposed to recover from that? Or this: “I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours.” The romance isn’t soft or easy. It’s desperate and consuming (literally) It feels like standing too close to a fire and knowing you’re going to get burned but stepping closer anyway One of my absolute favorite elements of the novel was the way Greek mythology is woven throughout the story. As someone who immediately falls in love with any well-placed mythology reference, these moments completely captivated me “Perhaps he is Ariadne and behind one of these walls is the minotaur.” That line perfectly captures the feeling of Hazelthorn. The estate itself becomes a labyrinth. Every hallway twists toward another secret. Every locked room conceals another horror. Evander spends much of the story searching for a thread that might lead him toward the truth, never knowing what monster waits at the center And then there was the quote that utterly destroyed me in it’s own way: “He is Icarus with wings of swan feathers, who chose to fly into the sun because it looked like a pretty boy.” I genuinely had to stop reading for a moment. Because that is Laurie and Evander. Not simply two people falling in love. Two people choosing each other despite knowing it might ruin them. A willingness to burn if it means reaching something beautiful The mythology references don’t merely decorate the prose, they deepen the emotional core of the story, transforming longing into something ancient and tragic Speaking of prose, C.G. Drews continues to write some of the most stunning sentences I’ve encountered in YA fiction Every page overflows with imagery The descriptions are lush without becoming overwhelming. Poetic without sacrificing clarity The writing doesn’t simply describe the horror. It becomes the horror. Roots twist through flesh. Flowers bloom where they shouldn’t. Bodies become gardens. The line between beauty and monstrosity dissolves until they’re impossible to separate The botanical horror is phenomenal! I’ve read horror before. I’ve read gothic fiction before. I’ve never quite read anything that felt like this (their works generally) The garden is alive in every sense of the word. It pulses beneath the narrative like a second heartbeat, growing increasingly sinister as the story unfolds. Each revelation made me simultaneously desperate to keep reading and terrified of what I’d discover next. And then there’s the mystery The mystery absolutely consumed me Every answer generated three more questions. Then every revelation forced me to reconsider everything I’d previously assumed. The final third of this novel had me gripping the book with white knuckles. The tension becomes almost unbearable as secrets emerge, alliances shift and the true nature of Hazelthorn begins to reveal itself Several times I thought I’d figured everything out and several times I was wrong The deeper the story descended into madness, the more impossible it became to look away. What impressed me most, however, was how seamlessly Drews balances genres. Hazelthorn is gothic horror. It’s also a murder mystery. It’s psychological suspense too. It’s body horror here and there aswell. It’s a deeply emotional character study and an aching queer romance. Rather than competing with one another, these elements intertwine, strengthening every aspect of the narrative And at the center of it all lies one devastating truth: “I’m only a monster because they made me monstrous.” Hazelthorn is ultimately about people who have been wounded so deeply that they’ve begun to believe those wounds define them. It’s about the devastating consequences of abuse, neglect, and isolation. It’s about learning that being different does not make you broken. It’s about finding someone who looks directly at the ugliest, most frightened parts of you and stays Some quotes will be living in my head forever: “Pain is meant to take up space or else we wouldn’t know how to scream.” “What if the worst of us is the only part that’s real?” “He belongs to this boy in the way a flower belongs to its god.” I highlighted so many passages that my copy practically became a second garden of annotations By the time I reached the ending, I was emotionally wrecked The final pages landed with extraordinary force, reframing everything that came before while simultaneously breaking my heart. Then came the author’s note, and suddenly tears were burning behind my eyes. I finished the book and simply sat there No scrolling No starting another novel Just sitting (and texting my best friend that got me to read it…) Thinking about Evander Thinking about Laurie about gardens and monsters and loneliness and love, how some stories don’t end when you close the cover. They linger, fester and finally they bloom For those who have ever felt out of place, those the ones who have been made to feel monstrous and also for everyone who have spent their lives searching for someone who might understand them. Read Hazelthorn! Once the garden has a taste, it wants the rest And honestly I don’t think I ever want to escape its grasp
Jun 25, 2026
