“What is magic but a change in the world?”
In Amal El-Mohtar’s new novella, The River Has Roots, the said river is brimming with grammar, and grammar is magic.
Amal is a Canadian writer of stories, poems and criticism. She is also the co-author, along with Max Gladstone, of the Hugo Award winning novel, This is How You Lose the Time War (2019).
The River Has Roots is based on a seventeenth-century murder ballad type, the “cruel sister,” wherein the same man will court two sisters, and the older sister will usually murder the younger out of jealousy. “[The man is] mysteriously never the villain of the ballad,” observed Amal in a recent What We’re Reading interview.
“My little sister is the most important person in the world to me and I just thought this ballad, while provocative, tells me nothing about my life and I feel the need to fix it,” explained Amal.
So, in Amal’s version of the ballad, the two sisters, Esther and Ysabel, love each other very much. Their family is tasked with the responsibility of tending to the enchanted willow trees in their small town at the edge of Arcadia, where the faeries dwell and a forceful suitor threatens their bond.
The river and the trees in the story seem to brim with magic, or as Amal calls it in the story: “grammar.” The story compares grammarians to constables and imagines a time and a place when grammar was wild. The very first line of the story sets this enchanting tone: “The River Liss runs north to south, and its waters brim with grammar.”
Amal explained that when she used to teach creative writing, “I always wanted to give them some hook into it that involved thinking about language as something inherently numinous. And inherently strange, like something that literally orders and organizes our thoughts as something very powerful and shouldn't be taken for granted.”
The River Has Roots is dedicated to Amal’s sister, and also her music teacher, Hoda Nassim. Hoda unfortunately passed away while Amal was working on this book. She recounted, “That made it very hard to work on the story. I had to put it aside for a while.”
Along with the loss of her friend, Amal, whose family is from Lebanon, also had to deal the grief of watching the bombings in Palestine unfold. She noted that there are elements in the book that are “a direct consequence of just trying to resolve the dissonance between working on something that is a fantasy-fairy-folkloric story, while at the same time these extremely literal material bloody terrible horrors are taking place.”
The River Has Roots is an enchanting story, but readers will have a difficult choice to make: physical book or audiobook? The physical book is very lovely, with linocut print illustrations by Kathleen Neely and gorgeous cover art, but the audiobook is very special as well--Gem Carmella’s narration brings the story alive, with Amal and her sister performing the singing, and the music of the flowing river throughout.
The physical book also includes a bonus story from Amal’s forthcoming collection Seasons of Glass and Iron.
For more information on Amal El-Mohtar and her work, visit her website.
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