If Women Rose Rooted : A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

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What a disappointment. I almost couldn’t finish this. Congratulations to everyone who enjoyed this book, I wish I was you. There is Celtic mythology in every chapter with very little analysis about how the stories relate to the female psyche. Instead, the author takes readers on her personal journey from leaving a stressful corporate job to finding the perfect cottage in the middle of nowhere where she can settle down and just be. Spoiler alert, she is never happy and has to move from remote cottage to remote cottage to remote cottage. This is just a boring memoir and I feel like I’ve been cheated into reading it. My husband David Knowles and I founded literary publisher Two Ravens Press (now under new ownership) in 2006, and in 2012 launched EarthLines Magazine, a full-colour print publication for writing about nature, place and the environment. The thing I liked the most was the authors journey. How she felt the calling to change her life in her 30s. How she failed few times to do so. And even when she thought she nailed it things still shifted. That eased the stress and need to figure everything out as soon as possible.

I love folklore, I love my ancestral knowings, lands, & the ability to tap into these things but for her it has so clearly jaded her to the reality of what these things will actually be like.As the feminine awakens and we rebalance the masculine & feminine, this book can guide us to reconnect, find our authentic selves, re-root into the Earth, release what no longer serves us and help us find a sense of belonging. Now, I'm cis and I call my reproductive organs my "lady bits," but that's because I'm a lady, and they are my bits. :P If I had different reproductive organs, they would still be my "lady bits," you know? I resonate deeply with the call to be a memory-keeper, a weaver of stories, and a creator, but I want to decouple the idea that the gift of creation is intrinsically mine because I have a uterus, and replace it with the idea that the gift of creation is intrinsically mine because I am human, separate from whatever bits my body bears.

My first novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue was described by The Independent on Sunday as ‘Hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story’ and by The Scotsman as ‘… powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach.’ 'If Women Rose Rooted', a nonfiction book about women, Celtic myth, place and belonging was published in 2016, 'The Enchanted Life' in 2018, and 'Foxfire, Wolfskin and other stories of shapeshifting women' in September 2019.. If you want to learn more about Bookshelves specifically, please read the Bookshelves FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). Women have long been told to “know our place”. This powerful and inspiring exploration of the female relationship with landscape turns the diktat around, showing us what may be gained from doing just that.’ Melissa Harrison, author of the Costa-shortlisted ‘At Hawthorn Time’ This is the core of our task: to respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognised once again as holding the life-giving power of the earth itself.’ Being from New York City, living in the Bronx, I feared this book would have little to offer me but I was wrong. There is even a section on how to appreciate the earth as a city dweller. The rest of it made me dream of another way of living. I wanted to move to rural Ireland immediately!What I would have liked to have seen in this book is a pronunciation guide for the Gaelic names and words (impossible combinations of letters!) and an appendix with the names and brief identities of the mythological characters and places. There are footnotes for sources which is helpful.

She talks a lot about her overworking patterns & escaping the corporate world that she label's the "waste land". A lot of blame is laid there too (not saying those things aren't an issue) but what she doesn't seem to have the ability to see about herself is she continually romanticizes what a connection with the land & farming should look like. Then when the going gets tough (because the land IS tough & so IS farming on any scale) she cuts tail & runs to the next fantasy that she begins dreaming up the moment the current fantasy she's just escaped to isn't adding up to what she's imagined it would. (I think in total she bought/moved 4 or 5 different homes in this pattern?) I really like the idea of viewing environmentalism through a lens of feminism and the study of myth and the history of a place. The idea of women as essential stewards of the land and of that stewardship being intrinsically linked to knowledge of history, including the history of mythology and the environment, was very appealing to me. But this book just didn't deliver that in my opinion.Mind-blowing. An anthem for all we could be . . . I sincerely hope every woman who can read has the time and space to read it.’ Manda Scott, author of Boudica and A Treachery of Spies A beautiful, intelligent and unusual book … I’m hoping this book will become the anthem of our generation, encouraging all women to surrender to the earth’s intelligence and rise up, rooted, like trees.’ Kate Forsyth, author of ‘Bitter Greens’, T’he Wild Girl’, and ‘The Beast’s Garden’ While I'm all up for this kinda stuff and was interested in what the author had to say, in the end I just found it too long and way too baggy - an edit would have been good. I also kind of knew a lot of this stuff (as a Welsh person who had the Mabinogion read to her in primary school), which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I guess I just could have done with something more or a different angle on it. Also, while the writing was fine, it didn't go beyond that - it wasn't like reading Jay Griffiths who writes on similar subject matters but really gorgeously - it didn't really do interesting things, or challenge stuff or make you think.