Title: Uprooted
Author: Naomi Novik
Genre: Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of children, death of parent, fire/fire injury, body horror, war, sexual content, attempted rape
Back Cover:
Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life.
Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood. Everyone knows that this year, he will take Kasia – beautiful, elegant, and talented, she is the obvious choice. Agnieszka has known her whole life that she will lose her best friend to the Dragon.
But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.
Review:
I thoroughly enjoyed the two books by Naomi Novik that I’ve read previously (Spinning Silver and A Deadly Education), and like I do every time I encounter two books by the same author that I love, I immediately set out to read all of that author’s other works to see if any of them are less good.
So far, no. Uprooted is just as good as the others.
Admittedly, it started out a little rough. The entire back cover is more setup than actual plot, and it’s skimmed over, mostly as exposition, in chapter one. But I kept going, because I wanted it to be good and because I remembered Spinning Silver was heavy on the exposition in the beginning and then it turned out fantastic.
The same thing happened here. What started as a very simple story – the wizard-lord of the valley takes a girl every ten years and the protagonist is taken – gradually unfolds like a blooming rose, revealing deeper and deeper levels of complexity and magic. The corruption in the Wood is sentient, plotting. It wants to take the valley and move on to take the world. The Dragon stands against its power, holding it back with fire and magic.
And then comes Agnieszka, brave and stubborn and full of deep caring for her people and rooted deep to the land the Wood wants to claim. She has to do two things the Dragon considered impossible before he would take her seriously, but she doesn’t give up and she is amazing. Agnieszka grows, the Dragon softens, and the characters are inseparable from the story and the land.
Since what’s on the back cover is so little of the story, I feel like I can’t say too much without spoilers. Which really sucks, because there is so much to the plot (the audiobook was 18 hours) that I would love to talk about. This book doesn’t follow standard story structures, which makes it feel more real – I can’t map it onto any fiction-writing templates, it ebbs and flows like real life. There were no less than three places that I thought must have been the climax and then saw there were several more hours of story to go. And I absolutely adore that in the end, even the antagonist was worthy of compassion and violence wasn’t the answer. (I don’t feel like that’s a spoiler since you won’t even know what antagonist I’m talking about until the last hour and a half of the book.)
I don’t often have the patience for audiobooks longer than 10 hours or so, but Uprooted deserved 18 hours of my attention and I would have happily given it more. Like the other two of Naomi’s books I’ve read, its delicious complexity slowly unfolds into something dark and rich and beautiful. I can’t put into words my adoration of this book but trust me: Read it.
Bluejay Reads 