rachelmanija | Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh

He felt himself for a moment as the stump of a rotten old tree, putting up thin green shoots at strange new angles.

A gorgeous fairytale which I am pretty sure started out as Green Man/Male Folklorist. Tobias is the wild man of an English forest in Victorian times, patrolling his wood and conversing with dryads and letting his mossy hair grow long. He's lived like this for four hundred years, until a flirty, bright-eyed folklorist named Henry Silver shows up at his cottage in a rain storm, soaking wet and very friendly.

I love forests and trees and moss and green, and this novella is a love letter to them. All the details of the magic and the woods are beautifully worked out, and feel both very magical and very grounded. The romance is a sweet, low-key slow burn. It's mostly about what it would be like to be the Green Man of an English wood, and how it would feel to start getting drawn back into human affairs. It's incredibly atmospheric, and the characters are great - Tobias, Silver, a dryad named Bramble, Silver's slightly Granny Weatherwax-esque mother.

I loved the ending to this, and it works perfectly well as a standalone. There's a sequel which I don't recommend.

I listened to this on audio. The performance by Matthew Lloyd Davies is outstanding.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Date: 2022-09-22 08:22 pm (UTC)

From:

sabotabby

no subject

This was such a lovely book. I didn't read the sequel—why does it suck?

Date: 2022-09-22 08:23 pm (UTC)

rachelmanija

I'll review that one tomorrow, but basically, Silver turns out to be an absolute asshole and I rooted for Tobias to never see him again.

Date: 2022-09-22 08:27 pm (UTC)

Oh no! Not every book needs a sequel.

Date: 2022-09-22 08:40 pm (UTC)

sovay

Silver turns out to be an absolute asshole and I rooted for Tobias to never see him again.

I didn't have that strong a reaction to him, but I didn't feel that where the sequel found him and Tobias actually followed from where the first book had left them, and I did bounce quite hard off Tesh's Fairy. I liked Maud and was left wanting a team-up book between her and Adela Silver, which I gather Tesh is not going to write.

Date: 2022-09-22 08:42 pm (UTC)

That too, on all counts.

Date: 2022-09-23 01:40 am (UTC)

hamsterwoman

I would also have been highly in favor of Maud and Mrs Silver adventures (far more than Drowned Country...)

Date: 2022-09-23 01:56 am (UTC)

That would also have been good!

Date: 2022-09-22 10:25 pm (UTC)

minoanmiss

Auuuuuuuuugh

Date: 2022-09-22 08:34 pm (UTC)

There's a sequel which I don't recommend.

I loved Silver in the Wood, even if my brain persistently wants to call it (but there are echoes of Susan Cooper throughout, so I don't feel terrible about it) Silver on the Tree. I expected something quite different from anything called Drowned Country.

Date: 2022-09-22 08:43 pm (UTC)

I also kept thinking of Silver on the Tree.

Date: 2022-09-22 08:45 pm (UTC)

I also kept thinking of Silver on the Tree.

Which was one of the reasons I was expecting more Cantre'r Gwaelod from Drowned Country and less unforeshadowed relationship angst.

Date: 2022-09-22 09:05 pm (UTC)

I would have liked that so much more.

Date: 2022-09-22 08:35 pm (UTC)

There's a sequel which I don't recommend.

Concur so hard! I was so disappointed by Drowned Country, it's one of those cases where I wish I'd never read the sequel.

But this one I loved for all the reasons you mention, including Bramble and Mrs Silver and the love letter to all things forest.

Date: 2022-09-22 08:44 pm (UTC)

Same and same! I did like Bramble's story in Drowned Country, but otherwise I'm regarding that book as fanfic which I didn't like.

Date: 2022-09-23 01:39 am (UTC)

I did like Bramble's arc in the sequel, yeah! (although I didn't entirely buy that it was as easy as that to resolve the problem her arc solves, if you know what I mean) And I liked Maud, I guess, but hated everything to do with Henry, ugh.

Date: 2022-09-23 01:58 am (UTC)

It was too easy as a solution, but it worked really well as her character arc.

Did you feel like Henry Silver being like that was foreshadowed in Silver in the Wood?

Edited Date: 2022-09-23 01:58 am (UTC)

Date: 2022-09-23 02:18 am (UTC)

Yeah, I really liked it as her arc, but I felt like something should've happened to make it plausible as a solution within the worldbuilding -- like an actual change from the first book.

Did you feel like Henry Silver being like that was foreshadowed in Silver in the Wood

NOPE! In fact I felt like it contradicted the feeling of Henry being "rooted" in the forest at the end of book 1. I don't remember, I guess we don't see the end of book 1 from Henry's POV, just from other people's, so maybe those people (Tobias? Bramble? I don't recall, it's been a while) were wrong about how he was feeling, but I definitely did not feel like anything at all in book 1 set up Henry being Like That.