Review of The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
Title: The River Has Roots
Author: Amal El-Mohtar
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy, LGBT, Romance,
Year Published: Expected 4 Mar 25
My Rating: 5/5
Blurb
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…
Review
Oh, what a joy of a book. Having read This is How You Lose the Time War, I knew I would be reading a beautiful book with poetic prose that I wouldn’t be able to put down. El-Mohtar is a master at portraying love, and in The River Has Roots, we see an abundance of it. We see love in the form of greed and anger; we see pure romantic love and we see sisterly love. The sisters’ relationship felt so real due to it being so comical, touching and intense.
The novella felt like a fairytale, almost like it was written in verse which was manifested in the groundbreaking magical system of grammar. It’s a reflection of the magical medium of prose itself; how meaning can be portrayed to each individual.
I will definitely re-read this!
The only gripe I have with this book is that the Kindle version was scuffed on my Kindle Oasis and was sometimes hard to read. The images made the text almost unreadable and broken in places.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC, all opinions are my own.