The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar Narrator: Gem Carmella
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance, retellings
Pages: 130
Length: 3 hours and 53 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.
“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”
In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.
There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.
But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…
My Review:
Thistleford lies just on the borders of Faerie – or Arcadia as it is called in this beautiful, lyrical almost fairy tale. (It reads so much like a fairy tale, and it certainly turns out to be one, but I kept thinking it must be a retelling of something I just didn’t recognize – and maybe it is.)
Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn live on the banks of the River Liss, and their joy as well as their duty is to sing to the magical willows that thrive on the banks of the river. It’s a task, and a delight, that has been handed down through the Hawthorn family for generations. Not just the singing, but also the care, maintenance and very careful harvesting of the willows and all the magical things they produce.
Because there is still magic in this world, even as ‘modernity’ encroaches, and the willows that the Hawthorn family tends produce the best magic-infused wood for working this world’s magic. A magic that is based on language, on the conjugation of words, and the transition of forms from the word “grammar” into “grimoire” – and back again.
Which is where the story of the Hawthorn sisters turns from love to tragedy and back again. Esther, the older sister, has fallen in love, not just with the Fae lands of Arcadia that border their own, but with one of the Arcadians, the wrath of the storm that calls themself Rin even as they refer to Esther as ‘Beloved’.
But Ysabel longs to remain with hearth and home, and resents the parting that she knows will come. She wants Esther to marry the neighbor who continues to court her in spite of her rejection – because that’s the future she wants for herself.
Instead, they find themselves thrust into the middle of exactly the kind of ‘murder ballad’ that Ysabel always loved to sing, and it’s left to Esther to sacrifice even more than she already has to keep Ysabel from making the same terrible mistake.
If she can find a way to make the magic that saved her reach out to a woman who has always loved her sister but rejected the magic that drives her very soul.
Escape Rating A-: The audio narration of The River Has Roots, in the hands – and more importantly the voice – of Gem Carmella – is absolutely exquisite. Not that the story isn’t lovely, but the reading, and even more poignantly the singing, of the narrator puts this story over the top in more than one way. (That the background and transitional music in the narration was performed by the author and her own sister added an extra bit of loveliness to the entire endeavor.)
Most of those ways are very, very good. The music of the Hawthorn Sisters is an important part – sometimes THE most important part – of the story.
There were also, however, and very much on the other hand, points where she was voicing the villain of the piece and she was so damn good at portraying his slimy villainousness that I wanted to throw something – preferably at him. He was so vile, and portrayed so well in that vileness, that I wanted to wash that voice out of my ears.
It took me a while to figure out what bothered me SO MUCH about the villain – because it was done so beautifully well – is that he’s a particular kind of villain. He’s a broken stair villain. He’s toxic, Esther knows he’s toxic, the narrator handles voicing his toxicity so well that it’s screamingly obvious, but he’s the kind of villain that is embedded in the system and manipulates it to his advantage even as the people around him just claim that he’s socially awkward and Esther KNOWS she’ll be portrayed as a hysterical female or receive some other gendered dismissal as long as he continues to seem like he’s obeying social norms and just doing it badly when he’s really hiding his despicable intentions under a thin veneer of ‘polite behavior’ and what he’s really trying to do is box Esther in so that she has no choice but to submit.
I’m going to try real hard to get down off this soapbox, but I’ll admit that it’s giving me extreme difficulty. The whole thing disturbed me considerably more than intended – but it SO DID.
As is fitting for a fantasy where the magical system is based on language, I fell so, so hard for the gorgeous lyricality of this story. At the same time, I have to confess that I was one of the few people who just didn’t ‘get’ or ‘get into’ This Is How You Lose the Time War, so I came into The River Has Roots hoping that I would like it but not predisposed to do so. It was an experiment that this time paid off.
From the beginning, the story reminded me a LOT of The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed with its setting on the edge of a dangerous fae country and its rules about coming in and attempting to go back out. It also very much has the feel of a fairy tale, and if it turned out to be a reworking or retelling of an existing tale I wouldn’t be surprised. Additionally it held echoes of Sharyn McCrumb’s Appalachian-based Ballad series that begins with If Ever I Return Pretty Peggy-O, which, come to think of it, are also murder ballads.
All of which meant that I wasn’t expecting a happy ending and was VERY pleasantly surprised – as were the Hawthorn sisters – when one arrived anyway. I’ll certainly be back the next time the author publishes a solo endeavor!
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