Review: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

Preamble

I first heard about this book at the beginning of the year while looking at a booktuber’s list of 2025 book releases to look forward to. Considering that Amal El-Mohtar was one of the co-authors of This Is How You Lose The Time War, a book I loved – Well, I definitely had to preorder this one to see what kind of magic Amal had woven this time around.

Let’ get into it.

The Book

This book is short and sweet. At 133 pages long, this is a book one can finish in one sitting. As such suffice to say it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The story moves at a fast pace and the book doesn’t dilly dally around delivering the narrative it wants to deliver.

This is ostensibly a fantasy novel and as such there is a fantasy world here that is somewhat unique – with the concept of grammar being equivalent to magic. There are also elements you have definitely seen in other fantasy novels – faerie, time shenanigans. It’s fine.

The narrative here has a fairy tail like quality to it. At the heart of it is a story about about sisterly love which I found heartwarming. There are bits of well written prose sprinkled throughout which I appreciated.

She felt as if she could conjugate grammar with her joy alone, as if she could reach up, grasp the sky, and shake the darkening sheet of it into dawn.

Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots

Since this book is so short, I don’t have much else to say about it. It was a nice change of pace to read something short like this compared to the much longer books I have been reading over the last few months. That said, I do find myself wishing that we got more of the fantasy world that was created here, there is a lot of potential in it.

Conclusions

Short and sweet with a well written fairy tale like story to it – this is a strong solo debut for Amal El-Mohtar and I would love to read more from her in the future. More specifically, I really want to see what they can do in a longer novel formal. But I’ll take a collection of short stories as well.

I generally don’t read the acknowledgement section of books as books are usually long enough that by the time I get to that bit I’ve had my fill of the author and skip the acknowledgements. In this case, I decided to read the acknowledgements and I am glad I did.

Parts of this book are autobiographical and are references to events that happened in the author’s childhood in Lebanon. In the acknowledgements, the author mentioned the horrific situation that unfolded in Lebanon, the carpet-bombings by Israeli forces. I’ll quote the last paragraph of the acknowledgements to close this review out.

I wrote and revised this book under the mental duress of seeing horrific war crimes against my people denied, excused, laundered, in the same language I use to tell stories. I couldn’t have borne this without the support of true friends and the grace of new fellowships emerging from a shared urgency in confronting that horror. To every person who has had the courage and conviction to say Free Palestine, to speak, scream, write, march, write to their representatives, confront, injustice, and work for the liberation of all people: thank you. It’s so hard to feel like these acts make any difference in the vastness of the world, but I am here to tell you that they made a difference to me.

Acknowledgements, The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

I think I need to start reading the acknowledgements at the end of books more.

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