And he read both, one after another, in a single sitting.

Even before I read this pair of books, I crassly joked about how “Silver in the Wood” might be sexual innuendo because I’m an irrepressible jerk.Īnyway, this jerk thinks that the Greenhollow Duology is one of the best things he read all year. The story began when his nominal landlord, the young and attractive Henry Silver paid him a call after moving into the nearby Greenhallow Hall. Tobias Finch is a “wild man” who lives in a cottage deep in Greenhollow Wood, and is thought by the townsfolk to be mad or dangerous-though in truth his true nature is actually much stranger. Thankfully, I have gotten better in recent years.Įmily Tesh’s debut works, Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country (together known as the Greenhollow Duology) is focused on a sexy mythical figure known as the Green Man, who is an enigmatic but ill-defined fertility or nature deity. Whether I wanted to admit to myself or not, I must have thought that romance is a frivolous genre, much in the same way that capital L literary fiction authors, secure in their ignorance, have condemned fantasy as frivolous as well. Why? I believe it was plain genre snobbishness on my part. I was labouring under the impression that it is a cottage industry in literature primarily concerned with quenching the thirst for intimate relations with every kind of exotic fantasy beings out there-beings such as sexy vampires, sexy werewolves, sexy fairies, sexy angels, sexy demons, sexy wizards and sexy centaurs-no matter how challenging it is anatomically. Standing at its shore, it seems to me to be a shallow sea teeming with Twilight novels and their closely related kins.

“Certainly haven’t seen a fairy king yet,” said Tobias.Įven though I am a longtime fan of the fantasy genre, I have somehow managed to stay out of the waters of the romantic fantasy/paranormal romance sub-genre. There are no dryads, no wild men, no fairy kings, and no monsters.

“There’s a lot of interesting stories about Greenhollow Wood, I know,” said Silver.

Greenhollow duology