Six Degrees of Separation – from Prophet Song to Whitethorn Woods

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where it ends up. This month’s starting point is the 2023 Booker winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

I got Prophet Song from the library this week for Reading Ireland 2025 as it is about an Irish family and takes place in Dublin (as I plan to read it I avoided spoilers).

First Degree

Another book set in Dublin is Tana French’s first book, In the Woods (2007), a haunting mystery about two Irish detectives and their investigation of the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, which may be related to an earlier disappearance. I prefer French’s Dublin Murder Squad series to her other novels but she seems to have moved on from police procedurals.

Second Degree

Children also disappear in The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (2024). This book is set at a camp in the Adirondacks of New York. When siblings disappear – 14 years apart – locals and law enforcement start searching, wondering how the two incidents are connected. Clearly, my instinct to avoid wooded areas is sound!

Third Degree

Gandalf warns the dwarves and Bilbo Baggins about another dangerous wood in The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937).

“Good-bye!” said Gandalf to Thorin. “And good-bye to you all, good-bye! Straight through the forest is your way now. Don’t stray off the track! – if you do, it is a thousand to one you will never find it again and never get out of Mirkwood; and then I don’t suppose I, or any one else, will ever see you again.”

Of course, they do leave the track, become lost and are captured!

Fourth Degree

A more benign forest is depicted in Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1932). Set in 1871, this is the first book in a beloved, autobiographical series, and is told from four-year-old Laura's point-of-view about her family’s life in a little log cabin on the edge of the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Older readers can discern the dangers that lurk just out of view, not to mention the hardships of homesteading, which Laura’s father embraces and her mother tolerates.

Fifth Degree

In The Grace of Wild Things by Heather Fawcett (2023), a lonely orphan whose only talent is magic runs away to the notorious witch in the woods of Prince Edward Island and begs to become her apprentice. The witch is more accustomed to baking children than teaching them, and in the isolated forest Grace’s chatter gets on her nerves, so this is a precarious relationship. Inspired by Anne of Green Gables, this fantasy shows the power of friendship is even stronger than magic. My review.

Sixth Degree

We’ll make our way back to Ireland with Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy (2006). When a new highway threatens to bypass the town of Rossmore and cut through Whitethorn Woods, everyone has an opinion about whether the town will benefit or suffer. But the local priest is most concerned with the fate of St. Ann's Well, which is set at the edge of the woods and slated for destruction.

So I managed to travel from Dublin to New York, the (imaginary) Shire, Wisconsin, Prince Edward Island in Eastern Canada, and returned to Ireland at the end, with links mostly involving woods and Dublin. Next month (April 5, 2025), Kate has chosen Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife.

Have you read any of my books?