April Book Review #6

Book: The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
Age-range: 16 and up
Recommended: Yes
As good as the first time?: Yes

Although this book is almost 15 years old, I didn't discover it until last year or the year before.  Surprisingly, our tiny little library in Pennsylvania had a copy and I read it, not really knowing what to expect.  This book is full of things that I love: fairy tales, mythology, the desert, writers, romance.  I have wanted to re-read this book for a while, but that proved more difficult than I expected once I moved back to Utah.  No bookstores within a 50 mile radius had it in stock and the one copy in the entire county was missing in action.

I finally found it yesterday (was it really only yesterday?) at a different library in a different library system.  So I started to read it again.  Through the Prologue and Chapter One I was confused at why I had liked it.  This wasn't the book I remembered it being.  Chapter Two made me even more wary and I was about to give up, but just couldn't do it.  Finally, there in Chapter Three I began to remember why I loved it.  I stayed up late, I woke up early, and I finished it in less than 24 hours.

This is a book difficult to describe.  The tag-line on the front reads, "An extraordinary tale of wild desert magic."  But that doesn't really get to the heart of it.  This isn't some wild fantasy, it's a remarkable book because of the very believability of it!  By the end you begin to wonder if you went out the desert you might find the characters populating this book.  You begin to believe.

So read this book.  Walk the spiral path.  I dare you.