Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh

[rachelmanija]

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.

Comments

[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.

[rachelmanija]

That too, on all counts.

[hamsterwoman]

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

[rachelmanija]

That would also have been good!