Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

Overview

The forest is a dangerous place, where siren song lures men and women to their deaths.


Deep in the wood lives a witch queen and her eight tree siren daughters. For centuries, they have harvested souls to feed the heartless tree, using its power to grow their ever reaching kingdom of ash, birch, and oak.


Owen Merrick lives at the edge of the forest, mapping the stars for the king in his father’s observatory. For years, he has resisted venturing over the garden wall, until one day he must enter the woods to find his missing sister. But one of the witch’s tree siren daughters, Seren, decides to save his life instead of end it. Now, no matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop thinking about her — the birch-bright hue of her skin and the way violets bloom in her hair. Every night, he goes into the wood to meet her, and their love for each other grows.


But when the constellations shift, the stars foretell an inevitable war between the witch queen and the king. With Seren compelled to fight for her mother, and Owen forced to join the king’s army, they are plunged into the heart of a conflict that seemingly no one can win and that might destroy both their kingdoms forever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781645676386
Publisher:	Page Street Publishing
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	118,374
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Joanna Ruth Meyer is the author of Echo North, which Kirkus called “A lush, captivating new twist on beloved fairy tales” and Publishers Weekly called “A compelling satisfying romantic adventure.” She is also the author of Beneath the Haunting Sea and Beyond the Shadowed Earth. She lives with her dear husband and son in Mesa, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

* "[W]onderfully imaginative...Into the Heartless Wood is easy to get lost in and hard to come back from, thanks to Meyer's excellent world building." —BookPage, starred review

"Into the Heartless Wood is an intense and haunting fairy tale tinged with horror, romance and magic, and filled with beautiful imagery of nature and love… gorgeously written, deeply intense and emotionally fulfilling." —Shelf Awareness

"A captivating fantasy story that takes readers on a journey..." —School Library Journal

“Uprooted meets The Little Mermaid in this gorgeously atmospheric and literally heart-wrenching monster girlfriend story.” —Rosamund Hodge, New York Times bestselling author of Cruel Beauty

“Brimming with lush prose, endearing characters and soul-stirring stakes, Into the Heartless Wood is reminiscent to Seren’s siren call—completely irresistible.” —Rebecca Ross, author of Sisters of Sword & Song

"A luminous, impassioned fairytale, alternately dark as choking briars and shot through with pulsing starlight. You may enter the Heartless Wood with your soul intact, but you'll surely leave a piece of it behind." —Laura E. Weymouth, author of The Light Between Worlds, A Treason of Thorns, and A Rush of Wings

From the Publisher

10/01/2020

Gr 9 Up—This book takes readers into a world of fantasy mixed with 19th-century technology. Meyer tells the story from two perspectives, Owen Merrick and Seren. Owen lives near the wood—the wood that killed his mother. Legend has it that a witch charmed the trees to harvest souls for her heartless tree. It is dangerous to go near the wood, and there's an unmistakable magic that takes people who dare to step foot there. Yet Owen finds himself in the wood, against his father's will, to spend time with a tree siren named Seren. Seren has a tumultuous past that intertwines with Owen's, but she still wants to be with him. Written in the stars is yet another prophecy of the Soul Eater, while a war is raging on between the king and witch. Will Owen and Seren be able to find their happy ending? The beginning of this fantasy starts strong, with Owen's perspective written in prose and Seren's voice written in free verse. The story easily catches readers up with the fantasy world and its history, yet compels them to find out more. Readers will easily anticipate the outcome, but it comes to a slow and overly-complicated ending. Secondary human characters have a range of skin tones, though Owen's is unspecified. VERDICT A captivating fantasy story that takes readers on a journey, yet leaves them hanging in the end.—Paige Kostelyk, DeMotte Christian Grade Sch., IN

School Library Journal

2020-10-12
In Tarian, a magical forest fights the kings’ railroads and telegraphs, and a young man is caught in the crossfire.

Owen, 17, raises his sister and keeps house by day while maintaining star charts for the king by night. Across the wall that edges his garden, the Gwydden, the power in the woods who has turned eight birches into her humanoid tree-siren daughters, steals souls and has her daughters kill in scenes reminiscent of a literary horror novel. Owen’s present-tense, first-person narration alternates with the jagged, vaguely poetic narration of Seren, the Gwydden’s youngest daughter, who no longer wants to kill for her mother. Centered on the relationship between Owen and the tree siren, this is a story with limited space for secondary characters, although an intriguing background mythos reveals itself through Owen’s and Seren’s stories. The emphasis on souls—evil feeds on them, the tree siren longs for one, and their importance, along with hearts, anchors much of the magic—lends a Christian moral code to an otherwise firmly fantastical setting that has a Welsh flavor. Familiar motifs, such as wilderness versus technology, a witch versus a king, and star-crossed lovers, placed in unfamiliar settings ensure that this dark romantic fantasy fulfills expectations without becoming formulaic. Owen is White in a world with some racial diversity and no prejudice.

Diverting. (Romantic fantasy. 12-18)

Kirkus Reviews