The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Beatty, Robert. Willa of the Wood (Book One). New York: Disney-Hyperion, 2018.

Willa of the Wood is the first book in the eponymous trilogy. The story is narrated in third-person past with a close focus on the main character, Willa. Willa was a young Faeran girl who lived in the Smoky Mountains with her clan. Unlike the rest of the clan, who had largely lost their magical powers and was no longer producing children, Willa had the power of woodcraft that allows her to cloak herself in darkness by calling on the trees of the forest to camouflage her.

The padaran of her clan was a godlike creature with strange, bronze skin. He was obsessed with human technology and gold, and he sent the young jaetters out every night to steal from the humans. Willa snuck off on her own to steal from a human’s house down in the valley so she could impress the padaran by coming back with the most treasure. When the jaetters disappointed him, he beat them, and Willa did not want to be beaten.

When Willa went inside the house, she found a man sleeping alone with his dog. Both of them were covered in injuries, and the wife and children from the photos were nowhere to be seen. While searching the children’s rooms, the man and dog woke up and chased Willa. The man shot Willa and she ran out into the barn. The man found her and, once he got a good look at her, he apologized and tried to help her. Willa panicked and ran into the woods where she could camouflage herself. She called a wolf that she once helped and asked a return for the favor. The wolf carried her to a magical healing lake guarded by a white bear. The bear allowed Willa to enter into the lake and she was healed.

The wolf took Willa home to Dead Hollow. She was worried about coming home so late, so she snuck in through the tunnels. She took a wrong turn and ended up in the subterranean levels where no one was allowed. To her surprise, she found a series of jail cells and a small, Cherokee boy locked in one. She gave him some cookies, but then left him there when the guards arrived and chased her off.

She went to her grandmother’s house and they talked about the magical little tree her grandma kept. She had taught Willa how to use her woodcraft after her parents and twin sister had been killed. The padaran ordered her into the great hall and told her that he had a special group of jaetters who he had tasked with hunting animals so that he could sell their parts to trade with the humans. Willa was horrified at this, and even more disturbed when he took her outside and showed her a series of traps he had set outside the wolf’s den. When the wolf approached, Willa called out a warning and then used her camouflage to trap the padaran in one of his own traps.

Willa heard screams and went back inside only to discover that the other jaetters had killed her grandmother. She escaped through the underground river, terrified about life without her clan and her grandmother. She walked through the woods and found a group of logger clearcutting the forest. A panther had been trapped beneath a downed tree in the river. She jumped in and helped the panther escape with the help of the otters.

She went back to the man’s house and showed herself to him. He introduced himself as Nathaniel and his dog as Scout. Slowly, Nathaniel and Willa formed a friendship and they both learned about one another’s lives and perspectives. Eventually, Nathaniel told Willa that a group of loggers who wanted his land had tried to intimidate him out of his home by killing his wife, who had been Cherokee. and children. However, Willa realized that the boy in the Faeran jail cell had been Nathaniel’s son, Iska. Before she had the chance to tell Nathaniel the truth, the loggers arrived and started a fight with him that ended with Scout being shot. Willa used her powers to make the trees attack the men, then she put the injured Nathaniel to bed and returned to Dead Hollow to release Iska.

Willa snuck back inside the tunnels using her camouflage and found Iska, who told her that both his siblings were alive, too. Willa got them and all the other children out of the cells and told them to escape through a certain tunnel while she warded off the guards, who were attempting to keep the human children to convert them into Faeran so the tribe would not die now that no new Faeran children were being born.

As the children escaped, the guards stabbed Willa through her neck. She fell to the floor and healed herself with her magic, but she slowed her heart down to play dead. The guards brought her to the Hall of the Padaran. She stood up in front of the clan and accused him of killing her father, who had secretly been his twin brother. She also accused him of having woodcraft powers that he used to change the color of his skin to appear like a god rather than like a Faeran. The clan turned against the padaran and he boarded himself up in his private rooms to protect his collection of human objects. On accident, he lit a fire that spread throughout the tunnels.

Willa escaped and returned to her grandmother’s house to get the little tree to finish healing her wounds. She planted it in the ground and then met up with Nathaniel’s children. Together, they returned to Nathaniel and the story ended with them all deciding to live happily ever after together.