Daughter of the Forest: Wonderful

Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

In Daughter of the Forest, Juliet Marillier deftly sets the fairy tale “The Six Swans” in dark-ages Ireland; think of the general time period of The Mists of Avalon, when Christian and Pagan, Gael and Briton and Saxon, were fighting and feuding and even sometimes getting along. The tale fits in amazingly well in the setting; the famous fairy tale echoes the Irish legend of Fionnuala and the children of Lir, which predated it. The transformations, the impossible quests, the painful vows work perfectly in the Celtic milieu.

Sorcha is the determined sister of the tale; she is a young girl with a healing gift and a love of nature. In fact, it must be Marillier’s love for nature’s beauty that shines through Sorcha’s words; every page is filled with lovely descriptions and a sense of magic. Her mission, to weave shirts of stinging starwort for her six brothers while remaining silent, is made even more poignant by two of Marillier’s additions to the tale. First, Sorcha is a born storyteller; everything she does has a story to be told with it, and even as she keeps herself mute, she tells stories to herself in her mind. Second, Marillier has given each of the brothers a distinct personality. Some remain somewhat two-dimensional, but two or three of the brothers are vivid as life, and this makes their plight more urgent to the reader.

I am floored when I hear that this was Juliet Marillier’s first novel. The beauty of the prose, the vision of nature, the haunting love stories, and the vivid characters ensure that I’ll be reading the two sequels, and anything else Marillier writes after that. Wonderful.