The River Has Roots

January 1, 2025

Award-winning El-Mohtar is the SFF columnist for the New York Times Book Review and coauthor with Max Gladstone of the bestselling This Is How You Lose the Time War. In her highly anticipated solo novella, she tells a story of two sisters who live in a town on the edge of Faerie. With a 200K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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January 6, 2025
This spellbinding fairy tale, the solo debut from Hugo Award winner El-Mohtar (coauthor of This Is How You Lose the Time War), introduces the Hawthorn family, who have tended the willow trees separating their human village from the land of Faerie, also known as Arcadia, for generations. The magical willow wood is most often harvested for practical things like furniture or wandmaking, but through the years a "foolhardy few” have been brave and reckless enough to attempt to harvest magic directly from the trees. The latest generation of caretakers are sisters Esther and Ysabel, who fulfill their family’s pact to the land by singing to the willows every night to thank them for their magic. Though the sisters are inseparable as children, as they grow older their interests diverge—a rift exacerbated by Esther’s romantic entanglement with a mysterious Arcadian called Rin. When the sisters’ smarmy neighbor, Samuel Pollard, becomes insistent in his proposition to marry Esther and thereby expand both their families’ businesses, Esther must decide once and for all between her mortal ties and her love for Rin. Though the abstract magic system, dubbed “grammar,” proves difficult to grasp, El-Mohtar’s ethereal prose paints a clear picture of the unbreakable bond between her worthy heroines. Readers will be captivated. Agent: DongWon Song, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.

Starred review from February 1, 2025
At the edge of the River Liss, which is alive with the workings of grammar, a force that can translate and conjugate the world, is a collection of willow trees. Two sisters, Esther and Ysabel, sing every night to the Professors, two willows that bow towards each other, in an ancient pact that their family has maintained for generations. Beyond the Professors is the entrance to Arcadia, the world of faerie, a dangerous world for mortals. Esther is being courted both by a local landowner and a mysterious fae figure, and the romance and adventure of Arcadia certainly attract her--but when betrayal strikes, she only wants her sister. This extraordinary novella is El-Mohtar's solo debut, after the splendid This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019), coauthored with Max Gladstone, went viral. It's a marvelous story that pulls on old Grimm fairy tales of violence and truth telling, of what it means to be sisters in a story of fae and folklore, and of the kind of true love that exists between sisters. Fans of Time War will find the same lyrical language encapsulated in this small yet epic package, and it comes with a short story from El-Mohtar's upcoming collection as a surprise bonus. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This short but mighty book is highly anticipated by the many fans of El-Mohtar's (and Gladstone's) surprise viral sensation, This Is How You Lose the Time War.

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Starred review from April 1, 2025
Two sisters fight their way back to each other across death and Faerie through riddle songs and murder ballads. After co-writing the epistolary enemies-to-lovers SF novelThis Is How You Lose the Time War (2019) with Max Gladstone, El-Mohtar makes a solo debut featuring another haunting harmony. The town of Thistleford is known for the grammar, or transformative magic, that flows from the Faerie land of Arcadia to be conjugated in the River Liss and translated through the Professors, the pair of willow trees rooted into its banks. The Hawthorn family is known for its willow-wood business as well as the stirring duets of sisters Esther and Ysabel: respectively, the gregarious elder daughter cheekily composing riddle songs for her immortal lover and the shy younger beauty who can belt a murder ballad but secretly wishes to be the adored subject of a beloved's poem. When a greedy mortal suitor forcibly separates the sisters on opposite sides of Arcadia's border, they must bridge an impossible distance measured only by how far the voice can reach. True to the title, darkness lurks just beneath the surface of this story, in which death is cruel yet not without its lingual loopholes. El-Mohtar's blend of prose and poetry will catch readers in its fast-moving flow, even if the magic system requires multiple rereads. The core tale will be relatable regardless of a reader's genre affinity: an ode to sisters' secret languages, a paean to petty adolescent envy reshaped into the foundation for growing together into adulthood, an anthem for bloody retribution. The only slightly bitter note is the rather neat resolution, but the poetic justice nonetheless adds up to a satisfying performance. A book you'll want to revisit like a favorite song, especially once you know the words to sing along.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.