Willa of the Wood
“Do you need the wooden wheel […] more than those trees needed their lives? Do you need the meat of the deer more than the deer needs her life, more than the fawn needs her mother?”
Willa, a Faeran night-spirit in the Great Smoky Mountains, is trained as a jaetter (child thief) of her clan. Gifted with woodcraft, the power to communicate with animals and act upon plants, Willa steals from the day-folk (humans) to earn the approval of the padaran, her autocratic leader. After witnessing the padaran’s violent corruption, she is branded a traitor. Following her grandmother’s death, Willa flees the clan’s lair, Dead Hollow, and finds shelter with Nathaniel, a grieving day-folk who has lost his Cherokee wife and children. Living with Nathaniel, Willa begins to grasp the complexities of human-nature relationships and uncovers the padaran’s worst crimes: murdering her family and kidnapping Nathaniel’s children. Determined to act, she returns to Dead Hollow, rescues the imprisoned children and exposes the padaran, triggering a fire that destroys the lair. In the end, Willa joins Nathaniel’s family and plants a magical sapling at the heart of the lair, hoping it will one day renew her ancestral home.
Willa of the Wood is an ecocentric YA fantasy that explores non-human personhood, interspecies kinship, and environmental justice. It animates the forest and mountain as communities of sentient trees, animals, rivers, and stones, foregrounding nonhuman agency and challenging human dominance. However, not every character recognizes nature’s liveness. While white-skinned invaders cut down trees indifferently, Willa, as a hybrid figure with a human body and “a leafy soul” (355), senses plants’ pain and animals’ sorrow. She carries her clan’s fading ancestral knowledge, and through woodcraft skills and kinship care, perceive what others cannot, including subtle shifts in color and the forest’s layered sounds.
Set in the Cherokee homeland, a real place with Indigenous histories that predate the novel’s fantasy plot, the story stages a tension between conservation and exploitation within Faeran society. The padaran presses the Faeran to adopt the newcomers’ language, lifestyles, and anthropocentric attitudes toward wildlife in the name of survival. Willa, by contrast, preserves traditional beliefs grounded in empathy, reciprocity, and responsibility to other beings. While Willa’s worldview echoes generalized Indigenous epistemology, the novel also includes Cherokee characters and specific Indigenous references that remain only lightly developed. The book therefore not only models environmental ethics relevant to climate literacy, but also invites dialogue about cultural representation and authenticity in multicultural education.
©2026 ClimateLit (Lizao Hu)
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Publisher: Disney-Hyperion, 2018
ISBN: 9781368009478
Pages: 384
Lexile Score: 920L
Format: Novels
Topics: Ancestral Knowledge, Anthropocentrism, Climate Literacy, Conservation, Ecocentrism, Empathy, Environmental Ethics, Environmental Justice, Human Dominance, Indigenous Epistemology, Interspecies Kinship, Kinship Care, Nature's Agency, Nature's Aliveness, Non-Human Personhood, Trees, Wildlife
