The River Has Roots

I think I used that book on my Powell's bookstore book bingo for award winner, because This Is How You Lose the Time War also won a Hugo Award.

Amal El-Matar won the Hugo for Best Novella this year with The River Has Roots.

Oh, cool.

And Amal El-Matar read the acceptance speech for Alex E. Haro.

This is for the Apple TV adaptation.

Also, Amal El-Motar won Best Novella for The River Has Roots.

And Ryan Coogler's Sinners, a masterpiece, dare I say, won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form.

A lot of well-deserved winners there.

So we had others, other Sword and Laserites.

For Best Novella, the winner was The River Has Roots by Amal El-Motar.

Best Novelette was Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H.

Pack.

Nice.

Best novella, The River Has Roots.

That was good, too.

That was a fairy tale retelling, which I love.

but, uh, who knows? It doesn't necessarily mean it'll happen, but, uh, but yeah, it seemed like that one had a good amount of buzz, um, toward the end.

The River Has Roots, I was excited about for Best Novella by Amal El-Motar.

And she mentioned that poetry is where she started writing and the first time she came to Worldcon, it was in Anaheim and it was to attend a speculative poetry reading.

That was like the thing that drew her to Worldcon.

They were all on my list of great things.

The River Has Roots is absolutely gorgeous, as Amal El-Motar tends to write.

I thought Summer War was really beautiful and dreamy.

Murder by Memory was so much fun as a murder mystery, but it's set in this totally different world.

They were all a joy in their own ways.

So that's what I thought.

Yeah, speaking of fairy tales, so The River Has Roots, which is the first one you mentioned.

I mean, I love Amal's writing.

Also queer, a queer retelling of Cinderella where Cinderella is the house.

The River Has Roots, which I know a lot of people really enjoyed last year, including myself.

That book was really beautiful on the page with artwork as well as on audiobook because there's music.

So I would say if you are feeling intimidated, especially on the size of some of these books, because we all know that a fantasy novel can be a chonker.

Like let your thoughts roam.

And that's more my kind of meditation than like... trying to you know have a blank slate but my last one which actually would get into most underrated sorry i'm skipping around a little bit most underrated which honestly it's not like really underrated because it is nominated for the hugos and i'm really really hoping that it wins it's the river has roots by amal el motar and like i think it's actually more popular than Outside of the fantasy sci-fi readership, for some reason, people who don't necessarily read SFF actually have picked it up more.

We haven't really talked about it at all on our Discord server, but it's one of those things where the pros... is engaging and lyrical and beautiful and the story has weight and it's like emotional and if you do listen to the audiobook it also has like sound effects it's like it got music and some singing it's like it's really well produced and it's a novella it's like really short honestly it's way shorter than you may think highly recommend i think more people should read it and talk about it and i hope it wins the hugo

people should read more novellas in the first place i should read novellas

Recently, All About Books host Pat Leach did just that by trying a book from a genre that she doesn't read, fantasy.

Happily, The River Has Roots by Amal El-Motar turned out to be a very positive experience.

Learn what Pat Leach found when she picked up the Nebula Award-winning novella, The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Motar.

It's online right now, nebraskapublicmedia.org slash

allaboutbooks.