There is something very wrong with the garden, but this book is an entirely different story. 💀🥀

Hazelthorn is absolutely delicious. Drews writing is as haunting and rotten as it is beautiful, and if you're a fan of lush prose, you will absolutely adore this book. The audiobook is a real treat, and if you can get your hands on both versions I highly recommend a tandem read. The way that Drews structures the words on the page is akin to reading poetry, and it sucks you into the minds of the characters in an eerie way that I absolutely loved.

The characters in this story are a feast all their own. I absolutely adored Evander and the solid autism representation that came with his character, and watching him agonize through the discovery of who and what he is was gut wrenching and goddamn wonderful. I never for a second suspected that Evander was the garden, nor that Laurie had created him out of desperation for love. And oh my Gods, Laurie. I would turn the world inside out for Laurence Lennox-Hall. Laurie is such a fascinating character, and the slow reveal that he's actually deeply, obsessively in love with Evander is phenomenal. You also find out through Evander that Laurie has never been the family's golden boy, and I swear my heart broke for these two boys like it was my own damn marriage on the line. The pacing is absolutely perfect, and the slow build of tension quite literally had me sitting at full attention as I rode public transit to work, lmao. The final few scenes are positively breathtaking, and by the end of the audiobook, I wanted to scrub it right back to the beginning and have another listen.

Needless to say, I've spent the past month and a half recommending this book to everyone I know. C.G. Drews does such a breathtaking job with the slow build of their psychological horror, and Hazelthorn is going to have me fighting a reread for the next I couldn't say how many months to come.

I really, genuinely hate to say it, but I was so deeply unimpressed by this book.

The concept of celebrities who've passed returning from the dead is absolutely intriguing, and as many raving reviews of this book as I had seen, I was pretty excited to get into it. I've always enjoyed novellas that weave fantasy into the world we all know and (sort of) love, so this seemed like an obvious pick from the Pride 2026 list. My spouse and I decided to listen to the audiobook together, and honestly..? We both wound up terribly frustrated by the entire experience.

I think above anything else, this story needed much, much more editorial support than it got. It had an intriguing concept that it completely failed to explore at any real length. The plot itself skipped around nonstop rather than exploring much of anything "on screen". The prose was very clumsy and made so many pop culture references that it became grating because I didn't understand a single one of them. Even from the beginning, I was confused for a long moment about who the narrator was. For a beat I thought it was an author's note, and then I realized it was the narrator, which brings me to my next point.

We know little to nothing about Darnell at the beginning of the story, and personally, I didn't feel I really learned anything meaningful about him by the end. We find out a handful of things about his past and some experiences that are relevant to the immediate plot points, but I wouldn't say there was any true sense of character development, nor were there really any moments that genuinely made me root for him.

Darnell's character is also just confusing as a whole. For a black man who says himself that he idolizes Harriet Tubman, he doesn't seem to know (or recall?) very much about black history at all. That doesn't make any sense, and it consistently distracted me from the story. And on the topic of history... this is a very, very basic rundown of black history. I had hoped to learn something new, and that definitely isn't something I got from this book. The storytelling also fell very, very short, which made the conclusion feel pretty unsatisfying/cliche.

The tone of the text is also just very, very preachy, to the point where we had to pause multiple times throughout the book because the nature of the storytelling was very triggering to my spouse, who has deep religious trauma. On that same topic, I found it rather odd that faith in relation to homosexuality was explored in this book in a very positive light, but there was absolutely no exploration of the harm that the other side of that faith has caused to the queer community.

I just expected more from this book. I could very much tell that Bob is a first time author, and at the end of the day, this text needed much more support than it got.

This book is a mind-bending blend of gritty, atmospheric prose and purely human horror.

This cast of characters is... Well. They aren't likable, but that's the point. Full disclaimer here, because they're one of my favorite authors, I've interacted with C.G. Drews's IG quite a lot, and because of that, I do outright know some of the intention behind their books. That said - I jumped into You Did Nothing Wrong half understanding that Elodie is absolutely not a character we're meant to root for. On the contrary, her actions regarding Jude are absolutely vile. She's "rough" (her words) with him and promptly "makes up for it" by being sweet, she manipulates him in order to get him to behave how she wants him to - for fuck's sake, she convinces him he's two years younger than he actually is purely for her own benefit. This woman is so very, very deep into her own delusions that she no longer sees the harm she's doing to her own child, and that's a horror that far too many people (myself included) have had to survive in the real world.

There's also Bren. For a good portion of this book, I was half-rooting for Bren. I knew deep down that he had to be hiding something, but for so much of the book it really does seem like he's going to be this poor kid's last hope at a decent childhood. He's trying, right - he's trying to make the house livable, and to help Jude, and to help Elodie with Jude, and Elodie refuses to allow it. That makes him a good guy, right?

....Ha. I thought. Let's just say Bren is in just as deep as Elodie.

To be honest, I'm still not clear on which parts of this book were real horror (as in, those horrific elements were tangible), and which parts were figments of Elodie's imagination. Drews is so good at making you question what the hell you just read, and honestly... it only ever keeps me coming back for more. The end of this book is so brutal and so real, and while it isn't a resolution for anyone involved... I think that's the point.

Autistic children come to this kind of harm all the time, and not enough people see it.