The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34108-2, $24.99, 144pp, hc) March 2025.
Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is an absolutely lovely take on classic murder ballads, with distinct echoes of the Tam Lin story and a soundtrack that might as well be wall-to-wall Steeleye Span. It might come as a bit of a surprise to readers who know El-Mohtar’s work only from the popular and multiple award-winning collaboration with Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War, but in fact it’s thoroughly in keeping with her interest in classic folklore, as reflected most recently in her (also award-nominated) story ‘‘John Hollowback and the Witch’’, which is included as a kind of bonus in The River Has Roots as a preview of a forthcoming collection. It also reflects her interest, as a respected critic and reviewer, in the grammar of storytelling. In fact, her very first sentence reads ‘‘The River Liss runs north to south, and its waters brim with grammar.’’ Grammar in this sense refers not only to the magic systems of fairyland, but to how the various classic folk and fantasy elements of her narrative fit together – a valid strategy, even if the metaphor seems to me a bit thick in the early chapters. We learn that time passes differently in Faerie (here called Arcadia), and that ‘‘a day in our lands might be a week in Arcadia; or a day in Arcadia a month in ours,’’ that one should never eat anything in Arcadia, and that a visit there might result in dramatic transformations or metamorphoses – all pretty venerable tropes, if handled here with impressive grace. Even the setting pointedly pays homage to earlier fantasy – the village of Thistleford lies near the border of fairyland in the tradition of tales from Ludwig Tieck’s ‘‘The Elves’’ to Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist and later, and like those villages is characterized by a ‘‘wholesome, settled tameness.’’
The sisters Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn are talented singers keeping up their family’s longstanding tradition of singing to the magical willows that separate Thistleford from Arcadia, while making a living selling various willow products. The older sister, Esther, also has a secret lover from Arcadia named Rin, but is being actively courted by the boorish neighbor Samuel Pollard, who virtually demands that she marry him in order to combine their estates. If Rin is a classic liminal figure from balladry, Pollard belongs to an equally old tradition of horrible suitors from Jane Austen to George Eliot. At first merely annoying, he grows increasingly ominous until he precipitates the story’s central crisis, leading each of the sisters to face crucial choices that will alter the course of their lives. A handful of minor characters, most notably a helpful witch named Agnes Crow, lend texture to the tale.
Much of the charm of The River Has Roots derives from El-Mohtar’s generous deployment of folk materials such as riddles and excerpts from actual traditional songs like ‘‘I Gave My Love a Cherry’’ and ‘‘The Light Dragoon’’, but what is more impressive is the seamless way El-Mohtar blends the lyricism of her own prose with that of her source materials. At the end of the tale, she returns to the notion of grammar, noting again that it’s not simply a set of language rules to be obeyed: ‘‘There is grammar that is ruled like a kingdom, and grammar that is ruled like a composition book, and there is always, always the wild, unruly grammar of ballads and riddles, and this is the grammar of Arcadia, which breaks the real into the true.’’ I’m not exactly sure what that last bit means, but I suspect it’s a pretty good description of what El-Mohtar sets out to accomplish with this graceful and resonant tale.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.
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