If you devour tales with fickle characters like faerie kings (Maas) or Slavic witches/vedma (Houston), you might enjoy both of these, but also Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries. Favorite lines, the wedding vows in The Bone Roots: “I promise to be with you as long as you’ll have me, and to keep my word to you and your secrets for as long as my shadow is long. . . I promise to share with you in good luck and bad, and to never willingly bring sorrow into your life.”
What can you say about a book this beautiful? It is about everything life is—love, loss, longing, the paradox of human being. This novel reads like poetry and philosophy but traces generations, evokes places, makes real individual lives. It took my breath away and reminded me of reading Rilke’s poetry for the first time. I found a favorite passage on every page, but here is one: “Perhaps consciousness only occurred when there were enough humans alive to generate the spark, to seal the circuit, the critical mass for the grain of sand to become the dune, the synapse to allow a flock to change directions in an instant” (19). What an absolute pleasure. https://www.annemichaels.ca/