The Wood Wife by Terri Windling

 

The room was now bathed in blue pre-dawn light filtered through the french doors and two small windows set deep in the adobe wall. Through the glass of the doors was a view of the Three Graces (as he had once named the three tall saguaro cactus in a letter to her) and a yard full of ground-hugging prickly pear, scrubby wildflowers and hard-packed earth. In the distance, beyond the long dirt drive, was the wash, a fugitive river that ran only after the heaviest rains. Its banks were edged by cottonwoods with the mountains looming behind them, black against the purple sky. It was a dramatic landscape, harsh and vivid. She did not find the desert beautiful.

-The Wood Wife

After being faced with a panoply of choices for my next book to read, I chose a favorite of my mom's, The Wood Wife. I always like to try people's favorites—just like I appreciate when other people try things I've recommended—although I go in with the understanding that I very well may have a different experience.*

I probably wouldn't have picked The Wood Wife out on my own, simply because I don't read much fantasy that isn't YA (or Sookie Stackhouse, which falls in is its own category to me). I'm also not particularly drawn to books set in the Southwest, but that turned out to be an asset in this case. Maggie Black isn't a desert girl either.  She comes to Tuscon after the death of her mentor, the poet Davis Cooper. Though she'd exchanged scores of letters with Cooper over the years, the two had never actually met; thus Maggie is surprised to find that she is the recipient of his home and its contents according to the terms of his will. Maggie is a writer herself—though she hasn't written poetry in many years—and she hopes this will be an opportunity to begin a biography of Cooper, as she's long hoped to do.

 As Maggie settles into Cooper's house, though, she begins to notice something unusual is going on. The objects that keep disappearing. The locked room. The cryptic letter Cooper wrote her the night of his mysterious death—did I mention he drowned in the desert? It slowly becomes clear that there's more happening out there than Maggie ever anticipated.

You have to take a bit of a leap with this one, I admit. Anytime you don't invest in the reality of the fantasy, as it were, it's going to come across as silly.  You can maintain some skepticism—Maggie does for quite awhile—but at a certain point you need to suspend your disbelief or you're not going to enjoy it. If the creatures Maggie encounters (spirits, fairies, or whatever you want to call them) had been all-knowing and benevolent, I might have scoffed, but their amorality kept things unpredictable and, consequently, more interesting. Although I thought the story got off to a bit of a slow start, I did find myself more invested as things continued, and I thought that the climactic implementation of the spiral path concept was pretty neat.  Some of the dialogue rang a little false to my ear, but Windling did a great job describing the desert (giving me, who's never been, a pretty clear mental picture). I think it might not be a bad idea to read more western-oriented books, particularly as I'm gearing up to move further west myself.

Up next: The most recent Sookie Stackhouse novel, Dead in the Family. Woo!

*The one downside of recommending things is that it's a bummer if someone doesn't enjoy something you loved. A little disheartening, isn't it?