The River Has Roots is a novella by Amal El-Mohtar. My book edition also includes the short story John Hollowback and the Witch which I’ll talk about below.
Finished on: 29.5.2026

Plot:
The Hawthorn family takes care of the willow trees that grow around the river Liss as it flows out of Arcadia and into our world. The proximity to Faerie has always made the river and the trees especially magic. The current guardians are the sisters Esther and Ysabel who sing to the trees every day. Esther has always been more curious about Arcadia and she also finds herself at the attention of one of the Fae. At the same time, a very human man starts courting her.

The River Has Roots is an amazingly beautiful novella. It gave me goosebumps and had me completely enthralled. I absolutely loved it.

When I read This Is How You Lose the Time War by El-Mohtar (together with Max Gladstone), I was maybe a little less enthusiastic about it as most other people seemed to be, although I still loved it a lot. But The River Has Roots had me from the very start and ellicited the reaction I expected a little from This Is How… That is: I could barely put it down, and when it was over, I hoped that there would be more of it. But then again, it was pretty much perfect just as it was.

It was pretty easy to see where the story would be headed in broad strokes, though there were always surprising little details. But the way through this story is so great, it didn’t matter that I basically knew where we were headed pretty soon. El-Mohtar’s use of poetic language; the images she conjures up (and I am not a visual reader at all); and the vibrant, wonderful characters – I was completely taken with all of it, including the beautiful illustrations and the folk songs that are included in the story.

I hadn’t realized that there was a short story at the end of the book, so I thought at first that I would get more pages with the novella than I did. It was a little disappointing at first, but John Hollowback and the Witch more than made up for it.

In the story, John Hollowback is looking for a cure for his deformity, his hollowed-out back. Something was taken from him, and he hopes that a witch can finally help him. But since he doesn’t know what he lost, he doesn’t actually know what he’s getting back.

It is an eerie story. Here, too, I started suspecting where thing were headed, but in a way that the story very much intended, I think. It asks quite a few interesting questions and gets the fairy tale tone just right. It is said to be a preview for an upcoming short story collection – and since I was a little late in reading this book, the collection has already been published, so here’s to reading more soon.

Summarizing: read it and love it.