DAUGHTER OF THE FOREST: Book 1 (The Sevenwaters Trilogy)

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first half of our conversation can be found over on Lynn’s site here and that’s definitely where you should start. Gorgeous description, amazing world building, subtle characters, a road of trials that leads past some extremely dark places and one of the most awesome heroines I’ve encountered anywhere. It is book one of the Sevenwaters Series; a six book, historical fantasy series about a prominent family in ancient Ireland. With her mother dying at Sorcha’s birth, and the distant lord Colum throwing all of his efforts into war against the invading Britains, Sorcha has been raised by her brothers, the seven of them forming a single whole, like the seven streams which give the holding its name. Or how everything is left pretty open-ended or simply unexplained, hopefully to be explained in a later book.

Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy.It's also refreshing that Sorcha is an incredibly strong female character, who faces some amazingly difficult obstacles, and yet never once does Marillier need to spell this out. Even though Sorcha is very much a pagan, with her beliefs about the spirits of the woods and her interactions with trees and herbs intimately bound up with her faith, and she is largely ignorant of Christian beliefs, the kindly old hermit Father Brian who taught Sorcha and her brothers to read is a Christian, a fact which Sorcha also simply accepts. Not to mention I’m almost certain that I would have said something out loud by accident at some point. So when I say that the atmosphere of fey magic and ancient ritual lingered for several days after I finished the book, it may say more about me than the writing.

Despite a fearsome reputation, these strange warriors aren't abusive or even rude to her--all they want is for her to heal their friend, a wounded blacksmith. Indeed, while I love a kickass lady warrior as much as anyone, in many ways Sorcha’s inherent toughness, shown through sheer willpower and willingness to sacrifice for those she loves is something I find far more inspiring. On the one hand, Marillier describes the skills allotted to women, from textile arts, to gathering food in the forest, and especially Sorcha’s knowledge of herb lore and midwifery, as the difficult and genuinely detailed skills they are, no less worthy of professional admiration than other crafts; indeed the very descriptions of Sorcha’s spinning, weaving and sewing the shirts would give me finger ache even without the starwort. That being said, the final test, where a man of action must face a very different sort of challenge, and where all of the feelings are laid bare was extremely appropriate. In that respect, do you think it’s easier for the boys to not remember themselves when they’re in swan form?I am somewhat torn about how to rate this because I believe the quality of the writing should be rated higher than this. Since this is the first book of a rather long series, there had to be some unanswered questions and problems to be resolved in the future but the ending is still satisfying. Throughout the novel, it is her task to break her brothers' spell, and she can only do so if she sews a shirt for each of them out of a brittle, needle-like plant that causes her hands to wrinkle and deform like that of an old woman's. With the exception of Conor perhaps, who seems to keep some of his own mind when he becomes a swan (because how else would we learn what was going on back home?