Another is a widow who has yet to learn to give up her grief over a life that never was and should have been, a love too early lost, a future blighted by an untimely death brought on by accident. She subsumes her feelings into restoring Orchard House, the magical House on the Hill of so many stories, and there succeeds in waking up the tree which bears the magic apples, the golden apple at the end of a branch covered in white apple blossom, the "silver bough" of the title -- and the apple can give her her heart's desire, if shared with a lover. The solution that Tuttle provides to this difficult question is poignant and touching. A heart's desire is sometimes simply... another chance.

The third is a young girl, there to trace her grandmother's Scottish roots... and is caught up in the fairy magic of it all because of the blood that runs in her veins.

As the town gets cut off from the mainland and from reality by a landslide, things grow stranger and stranger (it is a measure of how much certain ideas have permeated our mental landscape -- when odd old shops suddenly appear in a place where they had palpably NOT been the previous night, Tuttle describes one of them in terms that perhaps sit oddly in a book of so much magic and myth that is far older but are nonetheless perfectly encapsulated in the sentences that the shop "...would have been at home in Diagon Alley" ).

It isn't that profound or Full Of Message, but not all books have to be. Silver Bough is just a rollicking good read filled with wonderful characters (watch out for nesting Russian doll fairy grandmothers...) Recommended, particularly for rainy afternoons when you need reminding that there is still magic in this sad old world and sometimes all it takes is cutting an apple in a different way than you are used to doing. Magic is all around us. Lisa Tuttle has done a good job in capturing a small swatch of it between the pages of this book.