Despite an impressive collection of genre awards, Amal El-Mohtar had not published a solo work longer than a novelette until this year. So perhaps it’s no surprise that her first solo novella would be one of those books with hype levels that were off-the-charts. It was only a matter of time before I got to The River Has Roots, and when a couple friends picked it up this summer, I decided to give it a read sooner rather than later.
The River Has Roots takes place along the banks of a magical river running from the land of the Fae into the increasingly mundane human realms. It stars two sisters from the human family tasked with singing to the trees along the water, one with a love of riddles and the other of murder ballads—both of these will be plot-relevant. The older sister is being pursued by a loathsome neighbor, all while she seeks a way to be joined to her secret Fae lover. As is wont to happen, this causes problems.
The River Has Roots is an extremely short novella that reads quite quickly, with clear inspiration both from the riddle-heavy fairy tale and the murder ballad. As such, it’s important to expect the secondary characters to be cardboard cutouts, acting their roles in the story without any real effort to establish deep motivations. Approached from the right frame of mind, this can work well enough, but it can make for jarring moments if you don’t expect it. To take a benign example, the lead is appalled when the loathsome suitor—who had not to that point done anything loathsome—suggests that if they were married, they would be in an excellent position to help her sister find a match. There’s no real effort to make the reader understand why it’s such an offensive suggestion, but it comes from the character who plays the role of villain and as such it is treated as irrevocably tainted by villainy. He’s not a character the story wants to explore, but rather a character the story wants to overcome.
The style that eschews secondary characterization and doesn’t leave much room for slow buildup of key plot points can be frustrating, but it’s clearly meant to evoke a particular sort of story, and once the reader shifts into the proper mindset, it’s a pretty entertaining one. It’s an extraordinarily quick and easy read, with a classic Fae-adjacent borderlands setting and plenty of riddles and wordplay. It’s a book that you can imagine the author had a lot of fun writing, and it comes out in a pretty fun read.
That said, I’ve seen a number of early reviews calling this book an all-timer (a revelation, life-changing, etc.), and even if it’s a pretty fun way to spend an hour or so, I’m not sure I see the element that takes it from “pretty fun” to one of the true greats. The prose itself is good, but not shockingly so. The sisterhood relationship at the heart of the story is sweet, but while it gets more development than the secondary characters do, it’s such a short story in which the characters are separated so often that it’s not one that can be carried by the relationship. The riddles and the murder ballads are fun, and it’s entertaining seeing the villain’s comeuppance, but for me, that’s about as far as it goes. This is an entertaining read, but it’s not one to move heaven and earth to acquire.
Recommended if you like: vengeance-based fairy tales with pretty prose.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Elves and Dwarves (in name, not in trope) and also fits LGBTQIA Protagonist, Published in 2025, Author of Color, and Impossible Places.
Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.