Willa of the Wood

“But soon she pulled the pain of her wounds into her throat and she let out a long, plaintive howl. She howled in the way she had been taught, not by her mother who’d been killed years before, or even by her grandmother who’d raised her, but by a mother she’d befriended the winter before.”

Just as the previously analyzed passage aligns Willa with the trees, this passage shows that she is also a family member of animals. Willa’s relationship with her mother and father figures—whether good or bad—is also a key part of this novel, and her intimacy and trust with Luthien the wolf shows that, once again, she is cared for better by nature than by her own people, who have abandoned nature for greed and selfishness. Willa’s different experiences of family speak to The Role of Family in Resisting Oppression.

“Years before, when her mamaw could still walk, Willa remembered crouching down in the undergrowth of the forest with her twin sister, Alliw, the two of them watching their mamaw’s wrinkled fingers tracing reverently over the tracks on the ground—the deer with the cloven hooves, the mountain lions and wolves with their four claws, and the massive bear tracks with five distinct claws on each foot.”

This passage uses the imagery of the footprints in the wilderness to establish the environment Willa occupies, filled with the large animals associated with the Appalachian Mountains: deer, wolves, mountain lions, and bears. In a sense, this also gives the world she lives in a fantastical edge, since wolves and mountain lions are rarely, if ever, seen on the East coast due to deliberate predator killing sprees. Nearly everything in this passage is doomed—Alliw and her mamaw, wolves and mountain lions—setting the stage for the death of Willa’s current world.

“She liked how the white bear was older and stronger than the other bears, but he was serving them, helping them, protecting them. Her mamaw had told her stories about how it had once been the same with the Faeran, that all the members of the clan would work together, protect each other, take care of each other.”

This is one of many passages that foreshadows that something is deeply wrong with the Faeran people long before they even officially enter the narrative. If even the bears can care for each other and the humanoids can’t, and even the wolves can care for Willa when her own people refuse to, the Faeran people are corrupt. The novel is built on the dichotomy of the good “before” and the corrupted “after”: Willa’s ability to recognize that things were purer and better “before” when the Faeran followed the natural order of things is what makes her different from every other character.

“She felt the stab of a strange and unpleasant emotion twisting in her gut, but she quickly hardened her mind. If it had been an animal or a Faeran in this cell, she would have been right to feel sorry for it, but it wasn’t. It was a human. Enemy of the clan. Murderer of her people. It wasn’t a him. It was an it. And she was forbidden to have anything to do with it.”

A prominent motif in this book is dehumanization, and Willa must resist the urge to dehumanize others as much as anyone else. This passage shows her inner struggle to combat the programming she has been raised with her entire life—that humans are evil and killed her parents—against her better nature, which wants her to pity the child whom her people have unfairly kidnapped. Willa’s ability to see nature as a valued entity to be protected is her best quality, and she must learn to extend that grace to humans too.

“But Willa knew that she and Alliw were still together in their souls, for among the Faeran, who were always born in twins, the relationship between two twins was sacred. Twins always took care of each other, protected each other. There was no more noble deed than to support a twin, and no fouler crime than to forsake one. It was the bond that could not be broken.”

This passage foreshadows the truth of the padaran by establishing the moral code of the Faeran—harming or forsaking your twin is the worst thing imaginable. It also establishes Willa’s place in the narrative, as without a twin, she is completely alone, separated from the beating heart of her people and herself. Willa is half of a whole without Alliw and lives accordingly; her development throughout the book must be both to become an individual and to acknowledge The Challenges of Growing Through Grief.

“Having spent most of their living hours in the torchlit shadowed walls of the decaying lair rather than the moonlit meadows of the forest, many of the Faeran had mottled dark gray skin, sticky and muculent like slimy toads, and their hair fell gray and straggly from their heads. Others had greenish skin similar to her own.”

The imagery of the Faerans’ appearances provides a visual reality to the corruption of their people; they have been separated from the woods that sustain and protect them and are thus changed externally as much as they are internally. Importantly, however, their actual morality is not directly tied to their appearance: While Willa benefits from her exposure to the outside world, it is clear through this passage that corruption is something that has been done to them, and they have become victims of their culture’s decay.

“Now she had to prove it. Not just venture down into the valley miles away and sneak into a killing man’s lair. Not just get shot and crawl back into Dead Hollow on her belly, and fight and hide and blend and run. She felt it boiling up inside her. Now she had to prove it, prove that she had actually stolen these things, prove that she was loyal to the clan, prove that she was loyal to the padaran.”

This is a moment of intense internal change for Willa as she realizes the injustice of her own position within the clan. There is nothing Willa can do to belong, since the padaran and the clan is biased against her. Her effort and suffering is meaningless to them, since all she can do is give while they take from her until she is dead. Willa’s growing awareness propels her down her path to growth alongside the actual events of the novel’s plot as she grapples with The Importance of Identity and Belonging.

“But her mamaw’s eyes weren’t filled with pride or happiness or even relief in her accomplishments. They were filled with worry. It seemed as if her mamaw was thinking, You’re blending in a way that I never taught you. But it’s keeping us both alive.”

Willa’s life among the Faeran is tense and unsafe. The act of “blending” here becomes a double entendre; she must literally blend to match her surroundings but also must blend in action and word via conformity to save her own life. A key tension in the novel’s narrative and plot is how much Willa will compromise, or blend, to protect herself, as opposed to going against the padaran and standing for her own morals and beliefs. The example of her mamaw provides an important counter to the padaran’s power, invoking The Role of Family in Resisting Oppression.

“But she felt her mamaw’s spirit leave her body and rise up through her own, into her arms and her legs, into her chest and her heart. Where does a spirit go? Where does the new world begin? Into the boughs of the trees? Into the stone of the earth? Into the flow of the river? Into the ether of the air? It passes from one person to another, each into the other.”

The imagery in this passage centers the spiritual heart of the novel on nature once more, reminding Willa in her grief that the spirits of the dead flow through the land that sustains her. Her grandmother is gone, but never truly leaves her. At the same time, the neatness and beauty of this passage contradict Willa’s reality: She is isolated from her people and has lost her family and her culture. While nature provides comfort, it is not an answer to all of Willa’s suffering, as she still faces The Challenges of Growing Through Grief.

“The river was water, was blood, was all that had come before. As she floated with the current, she began to see horrific images in her mind, images of Gredic and the other jaetters pouring through the labyrinth and storming into her grandmother’s room, images of her mother, father, and sister fleeing through the forest from dark figures with long spears, and images of the padaran writhing on the ground in bloody anguish with his leg in the trap, his face turning slimy gray—a thousand images that she could not bear.”

Willa’s mental journey as the river carries her away is a summary of the ugliness of the Faeran people’s current state: People are dead, murdered by their own clan, and even the padaran, supposed to be a god, is lying to hide his own ugliness and truth. Willa’s coming-of-age arc truly begins with her understanding of the truth, even though it is only partial at this point in the novel. What she has learned, she can never go back from, which overwhelms her much like the water of the river.

“Trees she had known all her life—tulip poplar, black walnut, white oak, red maple—fell one after the other to the men’s saws and axes. A few of these elder souls had lived their lives in these mountain coves for more than three hundred years, others for fifty or a hundred, but all of them were being cut down in a matter of hours.”

Willa’s awareness of the trees’ lifespan, species, and identities as individuals makes the sight of the razed forest a warzone. While it may seem only vaguely horrifying to a compassionate human, this passage helps emphasize that for Willa, she is seeing the equivalent to people dying for no purpose except “progress,” which means nothing to her. Additionally, the revelation that hundreds of years of life can be decimated in mere moments mirrors the death of her grandmother, further emphasizing the fragility of life and experience in the hands of selfish and cruel people.

“She watched as the window near the eating room lit up with the soft glow of a candle. The stars above the trees provided all the light she needed to see, but she liked watching the glowing radiance of the candle as the man moved from one room to another, the light moving with him, leaving darkness behind, until finally he went up the stairs, into the room where she had once seen him lying asleep in his bed, and the candle went out.”

The imagery of the candle alludes to the hope that Nathaniel offers Willa, while also alluding to the fragile hope Nathaniel himself lives on, reflecting the important symbolism of fire in the novel. Willa is drawn to the candle for warmth and security, just as she is drawn to Nathaniel, while Nathaniel’s own life is barely functional, weak like the candlelight is to him. Their differing perspectives on the candle—exterior versus interior—shows their similarities and differences, and ultimately, their need for one another.

“But what confused her now was that she had actually climbed the Great Mountain, felt its presence in her heart and heard its voice in her soul. She remembered vast clouds of mist, and a soaring hawk, and trees, and mountains for as far as the eye could see. But she didn’t see any sign that the padaran, or anyone like him, had ever been there.”

This passage shows one of Willa’s first steps towards recognizing that the power of the forest is greater and more encompassing than the power of her people alone. This links to her later decision to be “Willa of the Wood,” a being that is not limited by Faeran or human identities but belongs to all of nature. Willa’s acknowledgement that the padaran is not God and her people are not the rulers of the forest is vital for her character growth and arc, changing her understanding of The Importance of Identity and Belonging.

“She didn’t know why she said she understood when she didn’t, other than that she wanted him to think that she did. She wanted to belong, to know things, to be part of things. She wanted all of this: the dog’s soft ears, the crackling embers in the fireplace, the washing up after dinner, and the man sitting at the kitchen table.”

After spending so much of her life fighting for basic support and care, the simple life Nathaniel leads seems like luxury to Willa. Willa’s list of the things she wants are simple images, demonstrating how much she has been deprived of her entire life as both an orphan and an abused, manipulated jaetter. Willa’s desire to experience The Importance of Identity and Belonging drives her actions throughout the novel, but Nathaniel’s comforting presence helps that desire be productive, rather than destructive, as it was when she was with the clan.

“She turned to the last of the four plaques and studied it. The stick. The snake. The kitten. The apple. She began to sound out the letters one by one. And then she stopped, halfway through the name. She did not need to go further. She already knew what it said.”

The diction in this section shows Willa’s trauma. When she is nervous, the narrative uses brief, short sentences to convey her fear. These clipped sentences, often separated on the page by line breaks, mimic heartbeats, emphasizing the drama in the situations Willa finds herself in. Additionally, the images she uses to learn letters are all nature images, showing once more that nature is her way of processing the world around her.

“I went down to Gatlinburg looking for justice for my wife and children, but when I accused the railroaders and the loggers, the sheriff turned stone cold. He didn’t believe a word of what I told him. He looked at me like I was crazy. Most of those men down there are bought and paid for, too many people making good wages with the railroad and the lumber company to let anything get in the way of it.”

While much of the book emphasizes the corruption of the Faeran, this passage shows that the Faeran are not the only one thing that is corrupt—the human world, run by companies and money, is equally corrupt, with no actual interest in justice when there are rich men who can line people’s pockets for the right outcome. The town doesn’t necessarily hate Nathaniel but will always prioritize the good of the collective over justice for the individual, even if it corrupts society and leads to greater harm.

“But Willa knew it was too late. The logger’s gun had done its damage. Scout’s spirit was gone. The last living member of Nathaniel’s family was dead, taken from him by the forces of the world.”

Willa’s specific phrasing that Scout is the last “member” of Nathaniel’s “family” shows her refusal to consider herself part of the family, a belief that will linger until the novel’s very last page. Willa is so thoroughly alone and broken by the loss of her own family that she cannot see herself as belonging anywhere or being valuable to anyone. This feeds into her behavior in the novel’s climax, as she consistently acts with only minimal regard for her life, since she believes she has nobody left.

“She didn’t remember giving him any indication that she’d come back for him, but it broke her heart to think that he’d been waiting for her to return all this time.”

Although Iska is not in the novel very much, this passage shows that his character is built on hope and belief in others. He believes in his father and believes in Willa, even though he only met her briefly and didn’t even know her name at first. Iska’s hope is foundational to his character and directly parallels Willa’s struggle to have hope in the face of her people’s actions and her own loss.

“There were no animals or trees she could draw on here, but there was something else. In each of these cells there wasn’t an ‘it.’ There was a ‘he’ or a ‘she.’ There was a human being, a living, breathing, thinking soul, with wants and desires just like her—someone fighting to survive.”

Once again, Willa has to come to terms with dehumanizing and humanizing others, but in this passage, she has fully developed her concept of others. While earlier passages showed her clinging to dehumanizing language like “it,” here she is confident not only in their value and identities as humans, but in her ability to rely on the human children for it. Willa now sees human children as people just like her, rather than an entirely different species.

“But even through the winter of all this, there had still been a trace of hope in her mamaw’s voice when she taught her the lessons of old, and there had been a glare of anger in Gillen’s eyes when she saw the injustices in the padaran’s hall—and these were the saplings that might someday grow into the light once more.”

Willa recognizes the value in her corrupted people in this passage, acknowledging that good can grow from darkness, like shoots after wildfire. The current ways and abuses of the Faeran must burn, but the Faeran themselves are still human beings with a beautiful culture and a value system they can return to. Willa’s ability to show the Faeran grace and unroot the evil of the padaran without blaming them for it shows her growth and maturity.

“Those who knew the truth have been killed. Those who raised their voices have been silenced. The memory of the past has been pushed from our minds. But I came here to tell you that his name is Naillic. He is not an all-powerful, glistening god. He’s a normal, mortal Faeran just like the rest of us!”

A major thematic thread in the novel is the tension between truth and lies. This passage, the novel’s climax, shows Willa using truth as a weapon and calling the padaran’s false identity out, even though she knows it will disrupt the “peaceful” life of the Faeran. By restoring knowledge of the truth, she empowers the Faeran to react accordingly, whereas before they had been shackled by the padaran’s narrative.

“She knew she should have been happy to see him dead. But she wasn’t. The jaetters had been shattered. Kearnin had died days before. Ciderg and at least a dozen others had been killed in the battle. And now Gredic was gone as well. She knew she should have been filled with triumph that she had defeated her enemies, but loneliness darkened her soul.”

Willa’s response here also demonstrates her maturity: She is not vindictive, even to people who have hurt her and her family but rather recognizes that the jaetters are as much a part of the Faeran collective and clan as she is. This shows that she truly understands the meaning of being “one” with the rest of her people. While sometimes people do have to die, she does not wish harm on anyone, merely protecting others and guarding her own values and allowing people to make their own choices, even if it harms them.

“As Willa looked around her at all the faces, it surprised her that many of the older Faeran in the group appeared to hate her even more than the others. She had hoped they would remember the Faeran of old that her grandmother had taught her about, but instead they seemed the most set in their ways, the most angry that their lives had been disrupted.”

The resilience of young people is key to the development of the novel’s plot. Adults—whether the padaran, Nathaniel, or the adults in this passage—have often dealt with far more in their lives and are less hopeful about the future, while young people, like Willa, Gillan, or Iska, can find a path forward and build a world out of the burnt remains of the past. Willa learns quickly in this passage that memory of the past and the ways of the past does not always make people more accepting of change, since older people often prefer comfort over revolution, even if the net outcome is better for everyone. Willa is a contrast to this, as she chooses to embrace The Challenges of Growing Through Grief in the face of hardship and loss instead of clinging to a corrupt and stagnant lifestyle.