Review: Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Posted on May 28, 2015 Updated on May 28, 2015

*I received a copy of Uprooted through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.

Agnieszka (pronounced Ag-nee-esh-ka) is a young woman growing up at the edge of the Wood. Her family is industrious, and, by and large, they lead a normal life. Their town is small, but tightly knit. Her best friend, Kasia lives only a few houses away. It would be idyllic, if the Dragon, a wizard with dominion over their valley, didn’t take away young women of the valley for years at a time. When they return, they all leave the valley for good.

Agnieszka and her family has never been too worried about the Dragon. He takes girls who are beautiful, special. He takes girls like Kasia. Except this time. This time, for reasons they can’t figure, he has chosen plain, normal, woefully wild Agnieszka. The Dragon and Agnieszka are stuck together. What’s worse: the Wood is coming closer. Reminiscent of stories like Baba Yaga and the Brothers Grimm, Novik’s story features some vivid scenery and lots of fast-paced action.

The story is told in a first-person narrative from Agnieszka’s perspective. She’s a classic protagonist: young, empathetic, overly impulsive. The Dragon, her “captor,” is a brooding, impatient multi-centuries old wizard. He’s exacting. This kind of sucks for Agnieszka for a number of reasons. She’s not used to the prim and proper lifestyle and isn’t a very quick learner. I liked them both, typical though they may be.

I thought that the story was going to be an escape tale: young girl gets captured, uses her cunning and will to defeat the bad guy and escape.

I was wrong.

Definitely more menacing is the Wood in the valley. The Wood is dark, enchanted, and if you go in, you come out contaminated. The Wood’s victims become agents for its evil. The Wood is slowly edging further and further into the valley. The only thing keeping it in place is the Dragon.

Agnieszka begins to learn from the Dragon. I liked the conflict between the Dragon’s instructive style and Agnieszka’s learning style. The Dragon is a classic instructor. The instructions are clear and to be followed to the letter. Agnieszka, however, is clearly not a classic student. She thrives on experimentation and is an intuitive person. This was appealing because it echos conflicts I’ve seen throughout my life. And some of the exasperation and frustration that goes in hand with it struck me as being pretty true to life.

The dynamic between the two of them was a bit off-putting at times. There’s a romantic undertone in a lot of their interactions. For me, it’s tiring to see a romance of this sort. It’s really just my own personal pet peeve, because I have always had male mentors and these stories don’t really get at the heart of a teacher-student relationship the way I’d like. Fortunately, I really didn’t think that it took up too much time in the story. The romance was far from the main plot point.

Agnieszka gets herself into a lot of trouble. She doesn’t always think things out before she acts. I was glad to see Novik didn’t let her out of these problems too easily. I was, however, a bit disappointed that she was, by and large, successful. I would have liked to see Agnieszka struggle more and lose more of her fights.

The descriptions are vivid, and they are very visual. I enjoyed that aspect of the storytelling. The plot was fun. I liked a lot of the battles and the imagery that Novik uses to show them to us. It wasn’t always the most unique in storylines, but was handled fairly well. My only complaint on that front is that there were about four potential stopping points and so some of the final scenes lost their impact for me.

Overall, it was an enjoyable story and a fun twist on the fairytale retelling subgenre.

You can check out the book on Goodreads: http://bit.ly/1PQEN87

or on Amazon: Uprooted