It was like the author couldn't decide what this book was going to be about. What follows is a cliche filled, half attempt to make a statement about slavery or something. The first half of the book was largely about Hazel being fascinated by the suffragettes in London after seeing one get trampled by a horse.but that whole story line gets dumped when she is sent to live with her grandparents on their Caribbean sugar plantation. None of the pieces to this book felt real and fleshed out. It felt like the author had read a bunch of other books about suffragettes, London, and sugar cane slavery.and wrote her own book without doing any further research. And having read RtS before this one, I had an OMG moment because I suddenly knew what Hazel's father had done, that she didn't know about. It's just like a little bonus if you HAVE. The three fit together as a trilogy - Ivy is Hazel's mother, and Rowan's grandmother - though you don't have to read them in order, or to have read the others at all. I was also glad to finally read this, having read both Ivy and Rowan the Strange. The two halves were two very different stories for a lot of the time! And as interesting as it was to suddenly be on the other side of the world, in the wilds, with the issue of slavery in the recent past, my interests lie much more with the suffragette half. the book here felt a bit bi-polar I thought, as much as I did love it. Which ends in disaster and her being sent to her grandparents' sugar plantation in the Caribbean. 13-year-old Hazel becomes very interested in the suffragettes, as well as in her classmate Gloria, I thought. Loved it! Especially the first half, set in 1913 London. There Hazel is forced to confront the dark secrets of her family - secrets that have festered, and a shame that lingers on. Such great trouble that she is banished from London, all the way to where her family fortune originates - a sugar plantation in the Caribbean. And when her bold new friend Gloria convinces her to take on the cause, Hazel gets her first taste of rebellion.īut doing so leads her into greater trouble than she could have ever imagined. She dies days later, bringing further attention to the suffragist cause. A woman in a dark coat steps in front of the king's horse, in protest at the injustice of denying women the vote. With an adoring father who grants her every wish, a place in the Kensington School for the Daughters of Gentlemen, and no pressure to excel in anything whatsoever, her future looks primly predictable.But on the day of the Epsom Derby - J- everything changes.

Hazel Louise Mull-Dare has a good life, but it's 'so' dull.

Hazel by julie hearn