Review: The River Has Roots

The River Has Roots

Amal El-Mohtar

Tor, March 4, 2025

I will admit to not being the biggest sci-fi and fantasy fan. I have read plenty of books that fall into those genres, and I trust the publisher Tor and the magazine Uncanny to bring the best of these genres to readers. But these are not my go-to shelves.

So I would not usually review a book like The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar except that I heard her short story “The Truth About Owls” on a podcast years ago, probably LeVar Burton’s. I was stunned. I thought about it for weeks afterward. I bought The Honey Month in paperback (it was weirdly difficult to find at the time) and listened to This Is How You Lose the Time War before it went deservedly supernova on Twitter. What I’m saying is, I’m a fan, but I try to keep it low-key.

So when I heard there was a new El-Mohtar novella coming this spring, I virtually ran to get a digital ARC for review. And here we are.

And where we are is Thistleford, a town at the edge of the River Liss, which has its headwaters in the fae land of Arcadia. Here also are two sisters, Ysabel and Ester Hawthorn, whose family has tended to the willows nourished by the River Liss for generations. The sisters have “voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane,” and every day they sing a hymn to the Professors, a pair of willows that stand as markers of the edge of Thistleford.

It seems almost a literary crime to reveal much of the story, since it is so short. Even quoting from the book seems unfair, since the magic underpinning of the world is called grammar: “Grammar, like gramarye, like grimoire.” This is from the very first page of the book, from the third paragraph, and yet I feel like I might have robbed you of something, reader, by telling you even this much. I came into this story absolutely cold, not knowing a thing about it other than the name of the author and its title, and it was the ideal way to plunge into this world.

The voice of the novella introduces a new idea to me, or one that I hadn’t considered before if I have encountered it elsewhere. Rather than an unreliable narrator, El-Mohtar uses an untrusting narrator; the reader is, for this storyteller, the unreliable one. We on the other side of the book might not be capable of understanding the workings of the fae or of keeping the secrets of grammar. It leaves the reader with the sense that any information shared with us is reliable, but the narrator is probably leaving quite a bit unsaid.

The River Has Roots is full of tropes, like the fae relationship to riddles and the dastardly suitor with his eye on the sisters (either one; it’s the family’s land he wants). There is a shapeshifting fae beloved from Arcadia. But the familiar beats of the fairy story are delivered with freshness, thanks to the spell woven by grammar at the heart of the story. It keys you in to pay attention to language, and El-Mohtar rewards the reader richly, with fantastic and rarely used words like knobble sprinkled throughout. The grammar is functionally enchanting, spellbinding, and charming for the world within the novel and the reader on her sofa.

This is a sofa book for sure. Or possibly a hammock, if you’re reading it over the summer. It is definitely a book for a sick day, or even better, a mental health day. It’s short enough to devour in an afternoon, or maybe over a weekend if you need to take a lot of naps to replenish your spoons. There’s just enough peril to keep you reading but not so much that you can’t sleep.

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