Long-time readers may recall that I have been a fan of Amal El-Mohtar’s work for years, and have even had the privilege of being on a con panel with her. So it was a pleasure to see her in conversation this afternoon at the Lillian H. Smith Library in conversation with Kelly Robson. Today was the final stop in a months-long, intermittent-yet-whirlwind tour for her novella The River Has Roots, published by Tor.
This event was particularly gratifying because I first heard an excerpt of this work at Can-Con in 2023, when she shared a reading block with Fonda Lee. (The work Fonda Lee read from at that point is still not out, as far as I can tell.) I remember being nearly hypnotized when she read an excerpt of Roots to the crowd then, and I can recognize now that it’s the opening to the work, which she read aloud here — a poetic discussion of the linguistic relationship between grammar and grimoire, and how language is a form of magic.
This is something Robson picked up on and asked about at the start of their discussion. El-Mohtar’s prose is lyrical, poetic, and yet transparent, leading to an amusedly indignant question on Robson’s part: “So: what the hell?”
This led into El-Mohtar recounting the circuitous, somewhat painful route (root?) it took for The River Has Roots to reach publication. Originally, it was a novelette commissioned by Audible, only for them to back out due to budgeting issues. (Luckily, Audible both paid her for her work and reverted the rights back to her, giving her the opportunity to expand it into its current form.) The novella eventually turned into the foundation for her four-book deal with Tor.
El-Mohtar also touched on several other topics during the talk and Q&A session, such as how her book’s references to Fairyland tie back into Crusader-era perceptions of the Middle East, her love of murder ballads, how harps are incredibly visceral instruments, and how human corpses are not good material to create a harp with.
Most striking to me was her discussion of how much love and loss formed the backdrop for the writing itself: her love of her sister, and how Roots is her attempt to write “fix-it fic” of the Cruel Sister ballad trope; her grief over the death of her beloved harp teacher; her grief and heartsickness over Israel’s bombing of her homeland of Lebanon; her incorporation of musical performance with her sister into the audiobook version of the story; and how songs included in the story were inspired by Palestinian folk song traditions.
My May reading plans are currently full (I still have to get to Mrs. Dalloway later this month, and read Night Watch in time for the 25th of May), but I am having a lot of trouble resisting the temptation to throw them all over and dive right in to The River Has Roots. It sounds like it will be absolutely beguiling.
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