The River Has Roots

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The River Has Roots
is the hugely anticipated solo debut of the New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award winning author Amal El-Mohtar. Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.


The hardcover edition features beautiful interior illustrations and a foil case stamp.

"Half delicious murder ballad, half beguiling love story." —Holly Black • "An absolute must-read." —T. Kingfisher • "Every sentence sings!" —Sarah Beth Durst • "Utterly enchanting." —Fonda Lee • "A story that outlasts itself." —Alix E. Harrow • "Truly exquisite." —Zoraida Córdova • "A beautiful, musical, and loving story." —Emma Törzs

“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…

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Published Mar 4, 2025

144 pages

Average rating: 7.44

16 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

suprmn80
Oct 27, 2024
In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees. But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…
hideTurtle
Jun 13, 2025
10/10 stars
The beauty of song, the joy of sisterhood, the duty of family, the cruelty of egoism/misogyny/arrogance, the wonder of new love, the tragedy of loss, and a reckoning with truth and consequence. All in a beautifully crafted, 100-page story told in vivid detail that can only have come from the mind of a poet. "Dead. She couldn't be. Not with a sister whose children she still needed to meet. Not with parents to whom she'd not said goodbye. Not when she'd been promised, promised a future not hours ago, a future she craved, where her loves didn't pull her in different directions but could sit together beneath the Professors' boughs and talk of the weather and what songs to sing to the trees."
allmimsyweretheborogoves
Jun 07, 2025
10/10 stars
The perfect faerie story. At first I was afraid that the language in this book was going to be a little pretentious, but once I settled into reading it, I realized that it was on purpose to make it feel more like an old Grimm's Tale and not only fit the story, but also somehow managed to give it almost a sort of ambiance that perfected it. The River Has Roots has at least a dozen classic faerie tale tropes (a pair of sisters, a faerie land, a magic river, a spurned suitor, an ageless love, witches, and magic to name a few) that are all woven together seamlessly without feeling at all forced or campy. Esther and Ysabel are the perfect pair of dichotomous heroines for the story, one being adventurous and the other more grounded but tied together by their sisterly love for each other and their complimentary singing voices that create a type of magic called grammar, which brings me to another point: I loved the idea of grammar as a form of magic. At first I didnt understand it, but then I came to understand that grammar is really just a set of patterns and rules, like there are sets of patterns and rules for everything.
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