Holly Black has been writing faeries longer than most of her readers have been alive, and The Darkest Part of the Forest is what you get when a writer spends decades thinking about a subject and then brings everything she knows to bear in a single book. It is her best standalone, and it is the book I recommend to readers who want fairy tale but want it dark and strange and entirely without sentimentality about what that darkness means.
Hazel and Ben Evans have grown up in Fairfold, a town in the Appalachians where faeries are real, occasionally dangerous, and woven into ordinary life in ways the residents have learned to navigate. In the forest on the edge of town lies a glass casket containing a sleeping boy with horns — a horned prince who has been there as long as anyone can remember, who local teenagers leave flowers and notes for, who Hazel has been half in love with since childhood.
Then the casket shatters, and the prince wakes up, and nothing about Fairfold is safe anymore.
The World
Fairfold is one of the best settings in recent YA. Black builds a town that has genuinely accommodated the uncanny — there are rules, there is a tourist trade, there are children who grew up knowing not to follow lights into the forest but knowing it anyway from the inside the way you know your own fear. The coexistence of the mundane and the magical feels lived-in rather than constructed.
The faeries of this book are not safe. They are beautiful and capricious and follow their own logic, which is internally consistent and externally incomprehensible. Black has always understood that the scariest thing about fairy stories is that the rules make sense to the faeries.
Hazel
Hazel is the book’s great achievement. She presents one face to the world — cheerful, easy, the girl who makes everything manageable — and carries something else entirely underneath it. Her relationship with violence, with what she’s capable of and has been capable of since childhood, is the book’s moral centre. She is not a comfortable protagonist, and Black doesn’t ask you to be comfortable with her.
Ben, her brother, is the more immediately likeable of the two — gentle, musical, talented, and nursing his own complicated relationship with the fae. The sibling dynamic is drawn with great care.
Why YA Readers Will Love This
For readers who grew up on fairy tales and always felt the danger in them more than the wonder — who read Grimm and felt the teeth — The Darkest Part of the Forest is the YA novel that meets that feeling honestly. Black writes the fae as they should be written: as genuinely other, genuinely dangerous, and genuinely beautiful, and all three things at once.
For readers who love folklore-adjacent fantasy — The Raven Cycle, Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone, Bardugo’s Grisha world — this sits comfortably in that tradition while doing something distinctly its own.
The romance is present and well-handled, but it is not the point. The point is Hazel, and what she has done, and what she will do, and what it means that she is capable of both. That question is the one that stays with you.
Published: January 2015 · Genre: YA fantasy · Standalone
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Darkest Part of the Forest about? Hazel and Ben Evans have grown up in Fairfold, a town in the Appalachians where faeries are real, occasionally dangerous, and woven into ordinary life. In the forest lies a glass casket containing a sleeping horned prince whom local teenagers leave flowers and notes for, and who Hazel has been half in love with since childhood. Then the casket shatters, the prince wakes, and nothing about Fairfold is safe anymore.
What makes the town of Fairfold a distinctive fantasy setting? Fairfold is described as ‘one of the best settings in recent YA’ — a town that ‘has genuinely accommodated the uncanny,’ with a tourist trade, children who grew up knowing not to follow lights into the forest, and rules for coexisting with faeries. The coexistence of the mundane and magical is described as ’lived-in rather than constructed.’ The faeries are ’not safe — beautiful and capricious and following their own logic, which is internally consistent and externally incomprehensible.’
What makes Hazel the book’s great achievement? Hazel ‘presents one face to the world — cheerful, easy, the girl who makes everything manageable — and carries something else entirely underneath it.’ Her relationship with violence, with what she’s capable of and has been capable of since childhood, is described as ’the book’s moral centre.’ She is ’not a comfortable protagonist, and Black doesn’t ask you to be comfortable with her.’
How does Holly Black handle the faeries in this book? The faeries are described as ‘genuinely other, genuinely dangerous, and genuinely beautiful, and all three things at once.’ The review notes Black ‘has always understood that the scariest thing about fairy stories is that the rules make sense to the faeries’ — a principle applied throughout, where the logic is internally consistent but externally incomprehensible to the human characters.
Who is The Darkest Part of the Forest recommended for? The review targets readers who ‘grew up on fairy tales and always felt the danger in them more than the wonder — who read Grimm and felt the teeth.’ It places the book alongside The Raven Cycle, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and Bardugo’s Grisha world in the ‘folklore-adjacent fantasy’ tradition, while describing it as doing ‘something distinctly its own.’
Further Reading from Authoritative Sources
- Holly Black — Wikipedia’s Holly Black article provides biographical and bibliographical context for the author, including her career writing faerie fiction from Tithe through The Folk of the Air — essential background for understanding why this book represents such a concentrated application of her expertise.
- fairy folklore traditions — Wikipedia’s fairy article documents the folklore traditions that Holly Black is drawing on — the original dangerous, capricious nature of fairies in folklore rather than their sanitised modern versions — giving readers the cultural context for understanding why Black’s faeries are the way they are.
