Our dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man. He protects us from the Wood. He doesn’t devour them really; it only feels that way. He takes a girl to his tower, and ten years later he lets her go, but by then she’s someone different.
Hey everyone. Today I’m reviewing Uprooted by Naomi Novik.
This review has spoilers.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik is a fantasy YA novel about a young girl living in a small village at the edge of the Wood, a forest with evil magic that threatens to swallow the land around it. Only the Dragon, the most powerful wizard in the kingdom, can keep the Wood’s dark forces at bay. But to do so, he chooses a young woman from the surrounding villages to live with him in his tower for ten years. Any girl born in a Dragon year is eligible for the choosing. And this year, everyone knows he’ll choose Kasia, Agnieszka’s closest and dearest friend. But when the Dragon arrives that year, he does not choose Kasia…
Now, it took me a very looong time to get into this book. Like a week. I even DNF’d it in the middle of that week and decided that I wasn’t going to read it at all. I just couldn’t get past how annoying the main character was, and how ‘told’ the story felt. It was also slow. Very slow. But, considering that I had just finished reading an 8-book adult fantasy series when I started this book, and that that series had a completely different tone altogether, I didn’t think I was being completely fair, and I was told that it got better. So I gave it a second chance and started the book all over again.
And I got past the slump a lot quicker this time. I don’t know why or how, but I did. The book didn’t seem to drag that much anymore, and the main character didn’t seem all that annoying anymore. I still didn’t completely like her, but I was past the ‘not-standing-her’ phase. I admit now that my feelings towards her were a little biased. When I first started reading this book, I looked up a few reviews from some of the BookTubers that I follow, and there are a lot of mixed feelings about it out there. Some of them really liked it, some of them really hated it. And I was letting that influence my take on it.
Like I said before, not every book is for everyone. But I’m glad I gave this book a second chance. Here’s what I liked about it:
Agnieszka and the other characters in the book. Now, I know I said earlier that I didn’t like Agnieszka all that much and I have a reason for that. At the beginning of the book we are told repeatedly that she is clumsy, that she isn’t careful about keeping herself presentable, that she gets her face and clothes dirty all the time, even with the most menial of tasks… don’t get me wrong, I’m all in for a strong female protagonist who doesn’t care what she looks like; after all, looks aren’t everything. But this gets tedious. At this point in the story it’s the only remarkable thing about Agnieszka. And honestly, it’s not a whole lot. She didn’t have a whole lot going for her for me to like her. Even she doesn’t think she’s as brave, pretty, or strong as her friend Kasia, and this poor conception of herself is accentuated in the first few chapters when the Dragon chooses her instead of Kasia, and he is all about being clean and presentable. A matter that we are reminded keenly about every time both of these characters interact. And it gets annoying. (This is a big part of the reason why I first DNF’d the book.)
“Well,” he said ungraciously, “you then, I suppose.”
It isn’t until much later though that we know why. And honestly, I think that this happens too late into the story for us to actually change our minds about Agnieszka and like her, if you didn’t like her from the start. So, I think it’s a matter of liking her since the very beginning of the story with all of her awkwardness or not liking her at all, and that is why there are so many contradicting reviews about this book out there. Even when Agnieszka first learns that she is witch, she doesn’t think too much of it and is happiest when she annoys and exasperates the Dragon with the lack of interest she shows in her lessons. And I get that she sees this as a form of revenge for the way he is treating her, for having been chosen when she wasn’t supposed to, and for being isolated from her family and friends, but her attitude also comes across as childish. And it annoyed me. She had absolutely no interest in understanding her magic. The ways she reasoned things out also exasperated me. It isn’t until Kasia is taken by the Wood that Agnieszka regrets her behavior and starts paying more attention to her lessons. And even then, Agnieszka isn’t like other witches (perhaps only Baba Jaga) and wizards. Her magic is different and unpredictable, and the complete opposite of the Dragon’s. But the way she happens to instinctively understand magic that the Dragon has spent years and decades trying to figure out made it all seem rather improbable, as if she were an innately powerful witch when everyone else had to study at least 7 years to even be considered a wizard or a witch; I get that the whole point with this was to let us know that Agnieszka’s magic was more natural and unpredictable than the Dragon’s… I just thought that it needed a little bit more of an explanation.
Now, with all this it might seem like I didn’t like Agnieszka at all. She isn’t my favorite main character, true, but I also didn’t dislike her in the end. What I liked most about her was how she loved. She loved Kasia, and the Wood taking Kasia was what gave Agnieszka the power to be that strong witch she is meant to be. It is not her falling in love with the Dragon, which is something we all know is going to happen. And I liked that. I liked that she didn’t need a man to find out who she is. It’s her loving her closest friend and finding the courage inside herself to fight for her and for everyone else that she loves. And that includes the valley, and the Wood itself. She loves the Dragon, yes, but she also understands that she cannot be with him if that means she has to abandon everything else that she loves as well. She is of the valley, and that is where she stays when the Dragon leaves at the end of the book. I liked that by the end of the book, Agnieszka has grown a lot. And is powerful in her own right.
Unfortunately, we don’t see much of this from Kasia’s side. I’m pretty sure that she loves Agnieszka too, since we are told several times that she does, but that’s as far as Kasia’s character development goes, if there is any. In fact, there isn’t much. And I was hoping for more. When Agnieszka recovers Kasia from the Wood, she is completely changed. She is made out of wood now, and I thought, “That’s interesting! I wonder where they’ll go with this?” But I felt that Kasia’s storyline suffered from Agnieszka’s and was put completely on the sideline. At the end of the book, we are told everything that happens to her after she leaves the capital with the children and Kasia doesn’t get past the resentment she feels towards her mother for her treating her the way she did when she was growing up. I thought all of this was kind of like an afterthought; honestly, I think that Kasia’s storyline had so much more potential considering that this relationship, the friendship between Agnieszka and Kasia, is the backbone of the story and the entire book.
The Wood. This, in my opinion, is the best thing about the book. When the book starts, the Wood is this mysterious presence at the edge of Agnieszka’s village, full of evil magic and creatures that do its bidding. And the most dangerous and frightening creatures of the Wood are the trees themselves. They are the source of its magic, and not even the most powerful wizard in the kingdom, the Dragon, can contain it. But the reason why the Dragon is just barely managing to hold the Wood back is because his magic is so different than the magic of the Wood. The Dragon’s magic is rigid and requires a lot of study, with every spell made for a specific purpose while the Wood’s magic is a force of nature, quite literally, and the complete opposite of the magic that the Dragon is fighting it with. More like Agnieszka’s magic. But not only that, the Dragon cannot hold the Wood back for much longer because he refuses to be bound to the land. Yes, he protects the villages close to the Wood from the power of the Wood, but he is completely aloof to them. He is not the land, whereas Agnieszka is. That is why she loves her valley so much, and why she decides to stay in the Wood at the end of book. But what’s interesting about the Wood is that it wasn’t evil to begin with. It became evil because of human nature. And this is actually the real villain of the story.
This villain was awesome.
But for all he’d saved us, we didn’t love him. He didn’t try to win our love at all; none of us knew him.
The relationship between Agnieszka and The Dragon. This is probably one of the most controversial things about Uprooted, and I saw several people say that he was the villain in the story. He is not. When Agnieszka arrives to the tower, he starts to change. He just doesn’t want to change, and he fights it by sticking to his old ways and by being a jerk to her. And he remains stubborn to his old ways until the very end, when he leaves the Valley after they defeat the Wood Queen. He doesn’t want to get attached to her, but he does. Inevitably. This is why a lot of people also say that the Dragon did not have any character development throughout the novel as well. He was a prick and a jerk at the beginning, and he was still a prick and a jerk at the end. I disagree. He did change, though not as evidently as Agnieszka. His character development was more subtle, and proof of this is the simple fact that he came back to the Valley at the end of the novel. He has finally accepted that he is bound to the land, through Agnieszka.
The way the romance between Agnieszka and The Dragon is handled is also interesting. In most love stories, it is the woman who gives everything up for the man. So when Agnieszka and The Dragon defeated the Wood Queen, one would have expected her to go with him to the capital. But she doesn’t. She stays. She knows where she belongs and where she needs to be, despite the fact that she loves Sarkan. She also knows that he feels that he needs to go; he is wary of people and attachment to others, and likes to keep to himself, so she respects that and doesn’t ask him to stay. It is his decision ultimately and she won’t force him otherwise, just like he doesn’t force her to go with him. There is mutual respect and independence. They are themselves first before a couple. And I liked that about this relationship.
And here’s what I didn’t like about this book:
The Magic System. Magic is a huge part of this story. But I didn’t entirely understand how it worked very well. I get that Agnieszka’s magic was supposed to be instinctive, spontaneous, and natural. And that there were no rules to it. It just flowed out of her, like water from a river. She was innately good at it and knew when a spell worked or not. But I would have liked a little bit more of an explanation of why her magic was so different from The Dragon’s, and why she could cast such powerful spells like lightening with only just reading the spell from the book once. Without the explanation, it just seemed too improbable to me and it jarred me.
The Writing Style. This is my biggest complaint. I did not like the writing style, and it was a big part of the reason why I couldn’t get into the book at first. Some parts of the book felt ‘told’ while others were just a jumble mess of dialogue with two characters talking in the same paragraph. It was a struggle to get used to this, and it took me a while to get past page 30 for this same reason. Another issue that I had with the writing style was the story’s pacing. The first part of the book is very slow whereas the second is packed with action. Things happen very fast, and sometimes it feels cramped. A lot of things happen. I liked the action though. Once Agnieszka goes into the Wood to rescue Kasia, things pick up and I read the book a lot faster. But still, the writing style was making me read it a lot slower than I usually would. I had to stop reading after a certain number of pages.
All in all, I can’t say that I would recommend this book. It’s not a bad book but it’s also not one of my favorites.
Rating: I Did Not Like It
