The Wood Wife

"Terri Windling is a very, very important person when you’re talking about fairy, because she and Ellen Datlow edited a series of anthologies of modern fairy tales throughout the ’90s and the early 2000s that were very important. The Wood Wife is an absolutely terrific book in a genre that I normally don’t like – having fairies and magic in the modern world. This normally drives me nuts: am I supposed to be stupid? How did I not see this, if it’s there? If there are vampires secretly running the world, this invalidates the actual world. So I don’t usually like it, and I particularly don’t like it if it’s written by Americans, and I particularly particularly hate it if it’s written by Americans and set in Britain. The Wood Wife is set in the US, in the southwest, in a very, very specific place. It’s using the European fairy tradition, but not in a culturally appropriative way – ‘Oh, we brought white people’s fairies here.’ Instead, she is also using Native American tradition, and making a whole planet of fairies, and it goes straight at cultural appropriation and settlers and coming into the land. In the Celtic stories, the Tuatha Dé Danann and Aos Sí are driven into the hills. They lose the land to the incomers. Windling takes that and uses it to talk about the settlement of that specific part of the US. She’s writing about fairies as numinous and other, but also fairies as muses. In this novel, fairies are the thing that inspires you to create, both visual arts and fiction , whoever you are. So it’s got that metaphorical level. It’s doing all of those things, and it’s also a corking good story: an investigation of the situation as our hero arrives there and discovers the past and current secrets. It’s an incredibly readable and really good book, and I think it came out before its time. Genre fantasy did exist,and was a broad church by the time that this was written, but there wasn’t so much of this modern-day thing when she wrote The Wood Wife ."