The Wood Wife
A dead poet, a desert house, and a drowning that happened where there is no water.
A poet inherits a house in the Arizona desert from a mentor she never met, who died in a dry riverbed with water in his lungs. Windling, better known as the editor who shaped modern fantasy through her anthologies with Ellen Datlow, wrote a novel about the Sonoran landscape and the things living in it that are neither metaphor nor decoration. It won the Mythopoeic Award and it takes the desert seriously.
Recommended by 1 Person
Jo Walton
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?
Interview · March 2026
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