There are sentences from books I read years ago that I can still remember almost word for word, even when I have forgotten most of what happened in the book itself. They come back to me at completely random moments, and songs are even worse for it; sometimes I hear a few words and suddenly I know the whole thing again, even though I could not have told you that I actually still knew it. We simply know, although we cannot say when or how we came to know. I thought about this often while reading The River Has Roots as much of the story is made up of knowledge that people don’t truly remember when they learnt it or from whom. There are old songs, family stories, particular ways of doing things and words that have already passed through countless other people before reaching Esther and Ysabel, the protagonists of this story. Nobody stops to explain how they know these things; they have simply heard them, repeated them, and grown up with them, and now they are the ones carrying the history forward.
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar is a novella that follows sisters Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn, who live in Thistleford, beside the River Liss, where their family has tended the willows for generations. Unfortunately, their lives are upended when Esther is pursued by a local man she does not wish to marry and instead falls in love with Rin, a being from the neighbouring realm of Faerie, specifically named Arcadia. His resentment at being rejected soon turns violent, placing both sisters in danger. There is no great introduction to the presence of Faerie that resides in this story. Why would there be? Everyone there has grown up beside them and has learnt how to handle the mysterious goings on that occur there the best way they can. I did quite love this lack of grandeur towards such an otherworldly aspect of the book; it made Thistleford feel as though it existed before the first page and will carry on quite happily once we, the readers, have left.
What is magic but a change in the world? What is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another? She runs; she ran; she will run again.
Words, names and the relationships between things have true power within this world, and there is a suggestion that understanding the world linguistically can also mean understanding how to affect it. El-Mohtar calls this power ‘Grammar’. Language certainly shapes reality in our own world through naming, persuasion and social authority; here, that relationship becomes material, as words participate in the physical transformation of things. We ordinarily think of words as representations: the world exists first, and language gives us a way to describe it. In The River Has Roots, the distinction between language and reality is far less black and white. To name a thing correctly in this story no longer means to just label it; it actually reshapes it.
As an English literature graduate, this concept felt like pure catnip! I wanted to know how somebody learns the magic of ‘Grammar’. Does it change depending on who is speaking? Are there parts of it humans simply cannot understand? What happens when words change meaning over time, and how much has been lost, mistranslated, or misunderstood? To my dismay, El-Mohtar seemed to prioritise the more poetic implications of Grammar rather than answering these questions. It seemed as if the story were asking the reader to just allow this magic to exist without much explanation, in the same way that we accept the unexplained laws of a fairytale. The book certainly held much of the same enchantment as the fairytales I read in childhood, but at only 99 pages, it had little room to remain with any of its ideas for long. In fact, that ended up being my problem with the book as a whole; I wanted more of nearly everything.
The River Liss itself is easily the most memorable concept in the novella. It begins in Faerie and flows toward Thistleford, its waters initially brimming with the wild Grammar that alters whatever it touches. Before it reaches the town, however, the bankside willows draw much of that magic through their roots and hold it in their bark, leaving the river far tamer downstream. To me, this was a truly wonderful bit of world-building. It creates such a haunting, lingering mood that seems to bleed into every corner of the story. I found myself completely pulled into the strange magic of it all, feeling that eerie fairy-tale energy long after turning the pages.
“I was an elder sister before I was a wife, and for longer, and that’s a shape I can’t easily shake.”
Esther and Ysabel are the part of the book I most wish we had been given more time with. Their bond is truly wonderful to see; every morning, they sing together to tend to the willows, their voices harmonising in such a beautiful way that specifically requires them both. To me, theirs was the great love story of the book. Because the story is so short, however, I never really felt the depth of their affection, which made it difficult to become attached enough for the emotional scenes to hit. As a character-driven reader, I found this a tad frustrating; I was more conscious of what their relationship represented rather than feeling personally absorbed in it. I felt a similar shorthand with Rin, Esther’s Faerie lover. While I understood why Esther loved them, I only ever received a glimpse of their relationship, and I wish I could have known them longer to fully see what they meant to one another.
The villain, meanwhile, is horrible in a way I found extremely enjoyable. He is the kind of character who appears and immediately makes you think, oh, I hate you. In a time where fantasy books are currently so saturated with morally grey antagonists, it felt incredibly refreshing that there was no attempt at a tragic childhood backstory to win our empathy; he is simply awful, and I was perfectly content for him to remain so. He exists purely to be a horrible human being, which makes him a fantastic foil for the story's softer elements. My only complaint is that, just like with the sisters, the book's brief length starved me of the page time I wanted, only this time, I wish I had been given more opportunities to dislike him.
But that is the nature of grammar—it is always tense, like an instrument, aching for release, longing to transform present into future, it into was into will.
The prose is as beautiful as I expected from El-Mohtar, and I enjoyed its slightly old-fashioned feel more here than in This Is How You Lose the Time War. Where that book, co-written with Max Gladstone, felt hyper-stylised and sharp, The River Has Roots has a softer, more rhythmic cadence. At times, The River Has Roots reads like a story that has been told repeatedly over a long period, where you can imagine different people adding and losing details each time they tell it. This fluid, almost conversational quality made the world feel incredibly immersive from the very first page. In fact, I read almost all of it in one sitting because it is so easy to fall into, which is probably the way a story such as this one ought to be read.
The River Has Roots is also a reworking of “The Two Sisters,” a traditional murder ballad originating in Northern Europe and dating as far back as the mid-1600s. This history made the idea of stories surviving through song even more compelling to me. Ballads are altered every time they are remembered, performed and subsequently passed down between people. So, El-Mohtar utilising a song with nearly four centuries of documented history to create an alternate version of it here felt especially apt. We often assume that preserving a story means keeping it unchanged, but oral traditions survive because people continue to use and alter them. I also suspect a lot of why the story feels so condensed comes down to these musical roots. When you look at the actual folk ballad, it is incredibly stark and just gives us the raw emotion of one event. The novella naturally takes some of that on too, which is a beautiful nod to how a ballad operates, but it does leave you wanting more on the page. El-Mohtar does something I love by turning that cruel song on its head to celebrate the sisters' love for one another instead of their rivalry, but because she keeps the song's swift, compact pacing, the narrative had to leave a lot of its magic unexplained. If only the novella had spent more time exploring its relationship with its source, because the way El-Mohtar breathes new life into such a dark and traditional tragedy was the most creatively thrilling element of the story to me.
Any part of Arcadia we glimpse in this tale becomes less Arcadia the longer we look at it, so in deference to our story’s geopolitics, we shall not be staying long.
In the end, I rated The River Has Roots three stars, which does feel a little strange because I really did close the book with a smile on my face, bigger than that rating probably suggests. I thought the prose was gorgeous, I loved the sisters, I was fascinated by Grammar, and I found the river alongside the stories growing around it so atmospheric. It is rare to give such a middle-of-the-road rating to a book that brought me so much genuine enjoyment, but the three stars reflect my deep craving for more within the book rather than a lack of love for what it is. The River Has Roots is very easy to devour in an afternoon, and I imagine its size will be part of what many people love about it. For me, however, it ultimately felt less like a complete standalone and more as if I had been told an abridged version of a much larger story I would have loved to have known.