Our Crooked Hearts

Two Timelines, Two Recklessnesses

Ivy’s mother Dana has a life in suburban Illinois that looks perfectly ordinary — a house, a husband, a daughter, a past that Ivy knows only in outline. But strange things have been happening in the neighbourhood: disoriented animals, a teenager in the woods with eyes that don’t look right, patterns of behaviour that suggest something is very wrong in the structure of things.

Ivy, investigating on her own terms, begins to discover that her mother was not always this contained, careful person. In the past timeline — set when Dana was a teenager in the 1990s — we meet Dana before the damage: a girl experimenting with magic alongside her best friend Fee, going further than she should, discovering that the costs of certain things are not apparent until they’ve already been paid.

Melissa Albert structures Our Crooked Hearts as an interlocking dual timeline, and the structure mirrors the thematic content: the past and the present are always in conversation, always implying each other, and the novel’s central revelation is about what connects them.

The Mother-Daughter Dynamic

Albert is most interested in what mothers don’t tell their daughters and why. Dana’s secret — her history with magic, what she and Fee did, what came of it — is not simply information withheld; it is a whole version of herself that she suppressed and rebuilt over, and the suppression is the problem that the novel addresses.

The relationship between Ivy and Dana is rendered with psychological precision. Ivy knows her mother in the way teenagers know their parents: as a type rather than a person, as a role rather than an individual. The revelations of the past timeline constitute an encounter with Dana as she actually was — and the encounter is uncomfortable for both Ivy and the reader.

The Magic System

The magic in Our Crooked Hearts is dark in the specific way that Albert’s fiction tends to be dark: it has real costs, it connects to something genuinely dangerous, and the narrative does not soften those costs. The rituals that Dana and Fee performed as teenagers involved themselves in ways they didn’t fully understand — the novel is in part about the specific character of teenage recklessness in relation to consequence, the way that sixteen-year-olds experience risk differently from thirty-five-year-olds and the reasons for that.

The entity that Fee and Dana encountered is handled with appropriate ambiguity — it is never fully explained, which is the right decision. What matters is what it did and what Ivy must navigate to undo it.

The Suburban Gothic Setting

Albert uses the suburban Illinois setting to productive effect. The gothic tradition is usually associated with old houses, isolated landscapes, and European settings. Albert brings it to subdivision streets and strip malls and the specific topography of American suburban life, which has its own particular horror — the way that conformity and safety-performance mask whatever is actually happening behind the closed garage doors.

The woods that appear at the edge of Ivy’s neighbourhood, where the strange teenagers have been seen, are the suburban version of the dark forest — a liminal space just outside the managed environment where things get weird.

Albert at Her Best

Albert’s earlier Hazel Wood novels established her as a novelist with a distinctive fairy-tale sensibility and a gift for dark imagery. Our Crooked Hearts is her most mature and sustained work — the dual timeline structure shows structural ambition that the earlier books didn’t require, and the mother-daughter dynamic gives the novel emotional substance that fantasy premises alone can’t provide.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Albert’s most accomplished novel — a dark, structurally sophisticated witch story with a mother-daughter relationship at its centre that is both psychologically true and genuinely unsettling.