What a great story with a mix of folklore and the occult! I read The Green Man's Heir, the first book in this series, a long time ago on the recommendation of Charles de Lint and loved it. Then I lost track of the following books until now.
Dan Mackmain is a woodworker and the son of a human father and a dryad. He's also under the protection of the Green Man. He is offered a job as the project manager of an estate under renovation to become a hotel. The grounds are under threat by a folkloric monster, and the Green Man needs Dan's help.
This is a terrific series based on folklore and the magic all around us. The characters are varied and interesting, dealing with everyday issues like work and extraordinary problems like wyrms or nixes. Ms. McKenna writes very well and deals with contemporary issues like drug use and drinking in a sensible manner. I bought all the rest of the books and I look forward to reading through the series. ( )

Off the cuff reaction: I preferred this to The Green Man's Heir. Here we get a single, slow-building story that takes in past misdemeanours, present socioeconomic inequalities and supernatural shenanigans. Characters get more page time so feel better fleshed out, although I feel the council estate kids and get short shrift here (we see them through the lens of middle-class sympathy or straight-out antagonism, so they're ultimately cardboard).

...in fact, that may be my core criticism of this series over all: villains are eeeeeeevil doing baaaaaad things, not really characters at all. Which is fine when we're talking woses and nixes, but makes Aiden a bit of a pantomime.

However, on the plus side there's plenty of atmosphere, and McKenna excels at grounding her fantasy with a solid sense of place and of the mundane. Dan has a day job, which cannot just be ignored, and quotidian problems like should he buy a kettle (yes, this is Peak English, and I adored it).

Ultimately, a fun, fast read and I am now invested in reading further instalments as they become available.

Full review ( )

I read The Green Man’s Heir last year and enjoyed it very much. To be honest, I’d been wanting to read some of McKenna’s fantasy for many years but had never got around to it. The Green Man’s Heir was on offer at the time I bought it, and while I’m no fan of urban fantasy I’d certainly enjoyed its Mythago Wood meets Midsomer Murders story. The book proved successful enough to warrant a sequel (which has been nominated for the BSFA Award, but lost out to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, which is also a sequel, as indeed was every book on the shortlist.). In an afterword, McKenna writes that The Green Man’s Foe had originally been a completely unrelated story, but had never been finished. But the story proved ideal as a sequel for The Green Man’s Heir, so she rewrote it as such. In this novel, carpenter and son of a dryad Daniel Mackmain is asked to project manage the conversion of an old mansion into a boutique hotel – because there is something weird going on in the attached woodland, and it may be tied in with the house’s history and its link to early twentieth-century British occultism. McKenna introduces a cast of believable and appealing characters, and lets her mystery develop over the length of the novel. There are some odd tonal changes as the story develops – is it a ghost story, an occult story, or does it all plug into the mythology developed in the first book? The answer is, well, all three, and the three aspects at times interfere with each other. It’s also much more Midsomar than the first book, although that is almost certainly a consequence of its location, a Cotswold village. And at times it felt a bit like a British detective series from the 1980s. But they’re minor quibbles. This is entertaining stuff, put together by someone who knows what they’re doing. The cast are likeable, the mythology works, and it all feels like a series with legs. More, please. ( )

I finished The Green Man's Foe by Juliet E. McKenna this morning.

This book is a sequel to The Green Man's Heir which I read and enjoyed a few years ago. The books should be read in sequence to gain the full benefit.

These books are set in the present day and deal with English folklore magic. The Green Man of the title is a mythical supernatural character linked to nature, growth and rebirth. As you might expect the stories are about the interactions between the world of humans and the spirits of nature who are still present in the modern world. The supernatural beings do not wish to be discovered but they still influence the world of humans, some for good and others for evil. Of course the stories are about the goodies fighting evil.

The main character, Daniel Mackmain, is the son of a human man and a Dryad (tree spirit) mother. He is human but has inherited some of his mother's abilities.

Juliet E. McKenna has put a lot of effort into using authentic English folklore and the supernatural creatures she has in her story are ones that have appeared in English mythology from archaic times.

Her stories are set in rural England and she portrays that world very accurately, both in terms of the human world, and that of the supernatural. She also weaves her story between the real world and the world of spirits in a gentle and convincing fashion. She deals with real societal issues, such as social deprivation and the consequences for teenagers left with feeling there is no hope for the future, and their manipulation by unscrupulous characters.

I would describe these books as gentle folk horror, the type of gentle folk horror found in Paul Cornell's Witches of Lychford stories.

Juliet's descriptions are very evocative. While reading the Green Man's Foe the world of the Cotswolds formed in my mind in a most vivid fashion. The pictures were wonderful and I really felt I was there.

I understand a third Green Man novel, "The Silence of the Green Man", is coming out in August (Corona virus permitting) and I will certainly be ordering a copy. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3366809.html

I found The Green Man's Foe very helpful and hopeful comfort reading. It's the sequel to a book I haven't read, a contemporary fantasy about an English chap with magical relatives, dealing with dark forces and teenagers going off the rails. I am marking it down a bit because the villain was pretty one-dimensional, or at least the protagonist's perception was, which weakend the investment I was ready to make in the characters. ( )