Review: Uprooted

Uprooted by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been a long time since I've read a fantasy novel, and Uprooted was a fantastic re-introduction to the genre. It had a lot of buzz, and I was intrigued by the premise - the "dragon" who takes young girls is actually a wizard - which promised some self-awareness of the genre while maintaining the typical fantasy structure. And that's exactly what I got: a smart fantasy novel that sticks with the fantasy tropes, follows the fantasy beats, but keeps the story fresh with sprightly prose, a unique villain, and a sense of actual weight and consequences that fantasy novels often forget.

The local lord, a wizard known as the Dragon, comes down from his tower every ten years and picks a local girl of 17 to take back from his tower. He doesn't seem to hurt them, but they aren't seen for ten years and when he releases them they never seem to stay in their home village, instead going off to the capital or the University. Agnieszka - always in a state of disarray, her clothes somehow always torn and dirty - is born in a year of choosing, and grows up her whole life knowing that her best friend Kasia will be the one chosen. Kasia is beautiful, smart, a great cook - there's something special about her and the Dragon always chooses the special ones. But twist! Agnieszka is chosen, because she is special in a way she didn't predict: she has magic. Now, neither of those surprises are all that surprising; they're exactly what should happen in a fantasy novel. But Agnieszka finds them surprising, and more importantly, I believe that Agnieszka finds them surprising, and I care about her distress and surprise. She's a standard fantasy protagonist endowed with compelling motivations and a decently strong voice, supported by lovely prose. The level of psychological awareness and depth to Agnieszka is the ground from which this book grows, and it's a solid and fertile ground.

Spoilers follow.

The Dragon (who is over a century old, though he looks young, we're told - pretty standard foreshadowing of the superfluous-but-genre-mandated later romance with Nieshka) trains her, but her magic seems different than his. It doesn't follow his strict rules and predictability. The stakes are raised when the Wood - the evil forest that threatens to consume the valley the Dragon rules, Agnieszka's home - attacks her village while the Dragon is away. She fights it off, but later the Wood strikes back by taking her childhood friend Kasia. Agnieszka does the impossible and rescues Kasia, also purging from her the corruption that the Wood bestows on anyone who enters it or is touched by it for too long, but Kasia is changed - she's impervious to harm and kind of looks like a tree. The prince, Marek, hears about this and forces Agnieszka and the Dragon to help him save the Queen, who was taken by the wood decades before. The Queen is also free of corruption, but there's still something wrong with her: she doesn't speak or move or have any will of her own. They take her to the capital to face trial (along with Kasia, though nobody cares) and Agnieszka becomes an official witch while navigating the complicated and (to her) vacuously formal nobility. Again, right out of fantasy 101. More bad things happen in the capital - I think in retrospect I understand that Agnieszka and the Dragon are blamed for purposely corrupting the Queen and a few other things, but that was kind of glossed over and I was/am confused why there were suddenly people trying to kill the crown prince and princess (and why Agnieszka was blamed for that in particular). Prince Marek leads an attack on the Dragon's tower aided by the Wood-controlled Queen, and Agnieszka and the Dragon are able to defeat them and the Wood, eventually.

As I said before, the pacing and the constantly-raising stakes followed up by actual consequences and emotional impacts are one of the things that set this apart for me. I will say, though, that I feel the world and the story both lack a little consistency. How does Agnieszka go from being exhausted by tiny spells to being able to cast feats that seemingly no other wizard can do in only a few months? Why are the wizards tired by spells sometimes, but not others? Why is her magic different from everyone else's, but only in certain ways? A lot of characters have abrupt motivation changes that are explained away as "the Wood got to them" but what does that actually mean? Because that differs from person to person. Most of these problems can be explained away as "because it's a fantasy novel, and in fantasy novels, the main character is special and different and more powerful." But given how concerned the story is with the emotional and physical consequences of war and traumatic magical incidents, I'm surprised it didn't follow the magical system or certain character developments through to their conclusions thoroughly. The Dragon suffers from this incompleteness especially. He starts off as cold and aloof and distant - I mean he takes girls from their homes and isolates them for ten years, seriously! But after like a week with Agnieszka he's suddenly a nice if slightly uncomfortable and strict guy. But hey - it's refreshing to see a male character lose his personality by becoming a love interest for the female main character instead of the other way around, for once.

Maybe the problem is how fast the book moves. I enjoyed it while reading, I kept gobbling it up as fast as I could, but there were moments where I felt like things happened way too quickly. Fantasy is notorious for its long-running series of questionable merit or need, but Uprooted could have benefited from a few extra books to make her journey from untrained peasant to powerful witch more believable. Especially anything that happened in the capital. Most of those scenes felt like stand-ins for longer sequences. That was the one place where the consequences felt out of proportion to the actions, and if there were more weight and more time behind for those it would be perfect.

Overall, the book indulges in fantasy tropes and follows the familiar patterns and movements of a fantasy novel, changing the setting and some of the peripheral details just enough to keep it interesting while retaining the same fantasy flavor, and got me invested enough in the story and the characters to keep me wanting more the whole time. Its strengths and its weaknesses both lie in how close it sticks to the Fantasy Novel template, but the strengths outweigh those weaknesses by far and won me over.

View all my reviews