Hazel and the Forest of Whispering Oaks

By J. Bancroft

Some trees talk. Some trees go silent.

And some girls are named by the forest before they know why.

Hazel is nine years old, quiet in a crowd, and very good at noticing things other people miss. Like the way the oak tree in her backyard has stopped rustling. Like the journal that appeared on her pillow with no explanation - warm to the touch, smelling of old wood and rain - and that, when she writes in it, writes back.
When a wood elf named Willa steps out of the tree's shadow at dusk and tells Hazel that an ancient forest is dying - silenced, tree by tree, by a spreading darkness called the Shadow Hollow - and that the trees have named Hazel as the one who can stop it, Hazel has a choice. She could go back upstairs. She could pretend she didn't see. She could let whatever this is happen without her.
She packs her bag instead.
On the other side of a golden portal, the Forest of Whispering Oaks is everything Hazel expected and nothing she was prepared for: ancient beyond imagining, alive in ways she is only beginning to understand, and very, very quiet. With a grumpy dwarf named Bramble who reads stone like a book and falls into brooks with remarkable frequency, a copper dragon named Fizz who is deeply convinced of his own dignity and wrong about this constantly, and a wood elf who has kept this forest for three hundred years, Hazel must find the source of the darkness, free an ancient dragon trapped for two centuries, and trust the thing she has always been best at: paying attention.
But the Shadow Hollow has noticed Hazel too. And it seems, impossibly, to recognize her - as if they have met before. As if someone planned this, long ago, and left the answers somewhere only Hazel knows to look.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GXVK2ZDQ
• ISBN13: 9798257925641
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"