Silver in the Wood

I was expecting a human perspective on a relationship with some sort of forest entity. Instead, I got a forest entity's perspective on a human, which was a very pleasant surprise. Tobias' narration is slow, atmospheric, and deeply rooted - the forest is a part of him and he of the forest, and that bleeds out of the prose. Very much my vessel of beverage, despite the romance plot (not bad, just not usually my thing - though as far as that goes, the romance itself is treated with a fairly light touch).

There's a bit of tropeyness in here - though I haven't read much in the way of "there was only one bed" stuff myself, I've read of it often enough to half-wince at the reference when it came up - but some might consider that a selling point, and I'd personally be willing to forgive a lot more in the way of tropey rough edges given the fact that it also gave me a paragraph on the clean smell of rot and the healing power of decay. Hands-down the best book I've ever read in terms of foresty atmospheric prose alone.

Selling points: gay romance, cute cat (nothing bad happens to her!), folklore, foresty narration.

Warnings: generally slow pacing, and the romance is light enough that if that's your reason for reading this it may come up wanting. The slow atmospheric foresty-ness of this whole book is enough of its substance that whether you like or dislike that sort of thing should be the biggest factor in deciding whether to read it.

Sometimes the headspace that you're in when you read a book matters, and I think this is one of those times. All throughout October I'd been binging horror and some generally violent books (it was spooky season after all), and I chose this one as a sort of a relaxing, cozy wind-down. Which is exactly what it was. Which is probably why I'm walking away from it wishing it were... well, more spooky and violent.

The potential was certainly there. This worldbuilding gave me the impression that the reader wasn't being shown everything that could and had happened in this setting. All kinds of things go bump in the night out in the woods, and the older the woods, the bigger the bumps. And this was an old wood where all sorts of characters had their histories passed down and bastardized until they were just local folk tales. When you get to meet these characters there is a vague sense of threatening power, but I got the impression they were pulling their punches.

In my opinion the climax happened a tad too early with the following exposition running on longer than I wished, which is saying something for a hundred-and-change page novella. The romance subplot left me feeling ambivalent and I feel like the overall story would've worked just as well had that relationship been more platonic. And I wish the loose depictions of fey magic (never use your real name with a well-dressed stranger who just walked out of the woods) and the ~true~ stories behind ancient local stories was leaned into harder.

I'd probably recommend this to whoever's looking for a quick, low-stakes fantasy romp that isn't set in a completely unrecognizable world.