Description
🏆 2024 BIBA® Novella Winner!
The Woodcutter’s Children is a multi-generational tale set in a simple world of dirt roads and a red river, against a backdrop of fairy tale and history. It is a story of transformation and redemption, and the importance of facing the truth.
15-year-old Greta knows little about her mother, who died on the day she was born. And she knows almost nothing about her Cherokee father George Conley, whose name she is never allowed to speak. To make sense of her life, she has only her grandmother Hartmut’s dark fairy tales, so often about spellbound people who have forgotten who they really are.
All that Hartmut has left of her lost family in Sweden is the blanket her mother knitted for her, which she has slept under every night for almost fifty years, and an old red book of fairy tales, a gift from her father. She blames George Conley for the death of her only daughter, and the sudden appearance of Greta’s half-brother Billy threatens to unearth all of the buried secrets.
When Greta and Billy find themselves on a search to face their missing father, they begin to uncover truths about themselves, even as Hartmut and George Conley confront their own ancestral traumas, beginning with the Trail of Tears. Eventually, each member of this fractured family must face the ultimate question: is a person more than their history, or what others believe about them? Is the most important story the one you tell yourself?
