Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

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Once upon a time, Hazel and Jack were best friends. But that was before he stopped talking to her and disappeared into a forest with a mysterious woman made of ice. Now, it's up to Hazel to go in after him. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," Breadcrumbs is a story of the struggle to hold on, and the things we leave behind.

The middle grade landscape is exploding with awesomeness for me right now, with Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu being the latest offering from the genre that impressed me more and more with each page right up until the end. Anne Ursu gets it. Out-of- the-ballpark right. She gets the 5th grader’s voice and perspective so perfectly that if she told me she inhabited a 5th grader’s body for a year to write Breadcrumbs, I'd believe her. I love how true and authentic Hazel’s thoughts and reasoning are, this clever, spirited girl who is much too imaginative for the mundane people around her. Hazel is plucky and adventurous – not at all an ethereal otherworldly child even though she fiercely believes in magic.

“When they had drama, she was the only girl who volunteered for roles in the skits. When they had art, she was the only who painted Hogwarts. When they did writing, she was the only one who made up stories about girls with magic swords and great destinies.

“She felt like she was from a different planet than her schoolmates, and maybe it was true.”

When Hazel declares that she’s better than any of Jack’s guy friends, I believe her. Jack would be a fool not to prefer Hazel over anyone else.

Though sure of herself in that way, Hazel also knows that she’s very different from everyone else; when she says that she just doesn’t belong, the reader feels the melancholy of this astute insight by someone so young. Jack is the only true friend Hazel has. I love how they communicate in “bookspeak” - dementors, daemons, and magical wardrobes are woven in normal, every day conversation as a matter of course. And Ursu is clever enough to know that any reader of Breadcrumbs would get these references without further explanation.

“Now the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in these things, that there are people—a great many people---who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes.

“But we know better.”

The world of makebelieve Jack and Hazel have created is her refuge from the real world, from her parents’ divorce, her isolation from people at school, and all the other disappointments in her life.

When Jack suddenly changes and stops being her friend, Hazel doesn’t just hope he’s been enchanted, her conviction is such that she knows only dark magic could come between them. And when he disappears, without hesitation, Hazel ventures in search of Jack, moving from the ordinary world to an enchanted one. Along the way, Hazel encounters a trail of twisted fairy tales – a woodsman, red shoes, swan skins, wolves, match girls – which are not at all what they seem.

This is Ursu’s genius – Breadcrumbs is never solely about a retelling of the Snow Queen. It makes the parallel between childhood friends growing up and apart from one another and the fairy tale of a witch spiriting a boy away from his best friend. Though she is searching for Jack, Hazel is also searching for a place of belonging.

“She looked at her shelves, filled with books in which the bad stuff that happened to people was caused by things like witches who lured people into the woods. In a weird way, the world seemed to make more sense that way. At least, it always had to Hazel.

“It was what she wanted to hear…That it had nothing to do with her. That it was magic. That a witch had enchanted him and swept him off into the night. That she could still get him back

“…

“It might be true that he had just changed that he didn’t want to be her friend anymore, that he had grown out of her like a puffy, purple jacket…It was most likely true.

“But what if it wasn’t?”