As if I might hear something that could be a night bird or a fairy skittering out of my path or just the loud, incessant hammering of my heart. As if I could smell the green moss drenched with rain,if I tried hard enough, feel the brush of damp leaves against my legs and the watchful gaze of a dryad, like a prickle on my skin. Reading this story, I felt less like a reader and more like a lost wanderer in an enchanted wood. Tesh evokes the landscape intensely enough to disappear the real world around you, to imagine yourself free and walking in Greenhollow. There was something not quite real about the experience of reading Silver in the Woods, something almost like a dream. And the story absolutely hums with the force of it all. She writes of stories and myths that call to you like a kernel of a secret, and become as much a part of yourself as blood and bone. She writes of monsters that watch over you, or at the very least, have not devoured you yet. She writes of curiosity, like an unfillable gap, a hole one could fall into and never find the bottom. She writes of home and roots, and of choosing not to be anchored at all, but be borne aloft, free. In sumptuous, illusory, and entrancing prose, Tesh writes of the sweetness of being known of love that comes so softly of people whose banked, quiet presence is like a palm pressed to your back, a steady pressure that dulls the edge of loneliness for a while. Silver in the Woods is a novella that absolutely delights the senses. But that's exactly what Silver in the Woods accomplished for me.

It's not very often that I read a story and a wild desire grips me to walk into the woods, to walk and walk and walk until I find someplace quiet and silent and still where all the world can disappear, and my misery can be turned into smoke, like dawn fog wicked away by the sun.

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh