This post was originally published on Audible.com.
In 2019, and co-author Max Gladstone made waves with the epistolary sci-fi masterpiece . Six years later, we’re thrilled to finally get a debut novella from Amal. flaunts the writer’s gift for lyricism and adds a musical twist. It’s the tale of two sisters, gifted in song, who have strong roots to their enchanted home and even stronger ties to each other. Everything changes when one falls in love with an outsider, spurring the ire of a jealous suitor—but not in the ways the average fairy-tale lover may anticipate.
Editors and asked Amal a few questions about her inspirations behind the story, her writing process, and what it was like to perform with her own sister on the audiobook.
The magic system in The River Has Roots is built upon grammar and words, which feels like such a natural extension of your own background in poetry. Can you tell us a little bit about what this story is about, and what served as the inspiration?
The story’s a retelling of a ballad type called “The Cruel Sister,” which usually goes like this: Two sisters are being courted by the same man (who’s mysteriously never the villain of the song). The elder sister is jealous of the younger, so she drowns her; in dying, the younger sister goes through a series of transformations before turning into an instrument that sings the song of her murder, bringing the elder sister to a gruesome end.
As an older sister who loves her younger sister very much, this ballad always itched at me; I wanted to play with it, rearrange its bones into something that pleased me better. So The River Has Roots opens with sisters who love each other, and sing together, and goes on from there.
Your last book was This Is How You Lose the Time War, which you co-wrote with Max Gladstone. How did the writing experience compare between the two?
Nothing really compares to the process of writing This Is How You Lose the Time War, which was honestly the most joyful and fulfilling writing experience of my life. I’m not sure anything will ever equal that—it was such a miracle to sit across a table from my dear friend and build a book that felt like playing a game and dancing a choreography we were inventing step by step. The process of writing Time War is comparable to how I describe the experience of Esther and Ysabel singing: a harmonizing that feels like magic when it happens, creating something more than the sum of our parts. Writing was about as difficult as any solo writing for me: a very slow beginning while I hem and haw and pick a halting way forward towards the feeling I want to express and the story I want to craft, before finally, after a few shamefaced extensions, writing in a relentless fugue state until it’s complete. But then it went through a transformative revision process where I turned it from a long short story into a very short novel, which was extraordinarily difficult, definitely the hardest revision I’ve done to date, both because I was trying to simultaneously preserve its tone and spirit while changing everything else about it, and because I was revising it during Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza and its bombing of Lebanon. “Timeliness” is such an interesting word—especially when things like ballads and fairy tales and the stories that engage with them are often called What are we doing, as writers, if not writing in ? In , a woman reckons with an awful man who wants something from her without any interest in who she is as a person or any concern for her well-being—is that timely, or timeless?
