Becca Strellnauer, Author
The forest remembers. The river keeps secrets. Stories of magic hidden in nature — and the women who find it.
WOUNDWOOD
For readers who wept at A Monster Calls, laughed through We All Want Impossible Things, and fell in love with the octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures — Woundwood is for readers who want grief answered with beauty, motherhood rendered with honesty, and magic that lives in the real natural world.
Faye has always believed that if she loves hard enough, plans carefully enough, holds on tightly enough — she can keep the worst of the world from reaching the people she loves. It has cost her the color of her days without her noticing it go.
When her best friend Hazel receives a stage four breast cancer diagnosis, Faye runs to the ancient forest at the edge of her yard — the one that has been waiting for her since she was seven years old. There she finds Mother Tree, the sentient pine who has known her since childhood and sees her more clearly than anyone in her life. For the first time in years, Faye begins to open.
But the forest is asking something in return. As Hazel's cancer spreads, her son's speech fails, the Tree begins to wither, and a wildfire tears through the Montana ranges, Faye must face the question the forest has been trying to answer all year: what if love was never meant to be a form of protection? What if the only way through is to let go?
She can survive the fire. She can survive Hazel's death. What she cannot survive is realizing, when it is over, that she spent the whole year at the edge of something extraordinary and never walked in.
Currently seeking representation.
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Meet the Author
I grew up in the Flathead Valley of Montana, where the forest was never just a backdrop. I have been writing stories my whole life, first on Storybook Weaver before I could hold a pencil, then in glitter notebooks with Lisa Frank pens, then on a hard drive, and now on a Mac laptop in a house at the edge of the mountains.
Writing is how I make sense of the world and find truths I can live inside. I earned a degree in English Education because I wanted to help others do the same, and spent nearly ten years teaching high school English, first in Missoula, then San Jose, then Austin, before becoming a mother of two and finding my way back to Montana, and to the page.
Woundwood is my debut novel. I live in the Flathead Valley with my family and my dogs Nelly and Hobbes, and unlike my protagonist, I do not make the forest wait.
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