A wonderful folkloric fantasy by the author of the Temeraire series. The characters are excellent, the descriptions of magic are brilliant and original, and the story is action-packed from start to finish, yet the author manages to fit in character development and to engage the reader's emotions as they follow Agnieszka's journey from ordinary village girl to wizard's assistant to ... read it and find out. The author has built the book's world on the Polish culture and folklore of her family background, and this gives Uprooted a depth and authenticity that enhances the story all through. Very highly recommended. I don't often give five stars.

I love a good fantasy rooted in folklore, and Novik does a great job mining the mythology of Eastern Europe for this novel. Young Agnieszka lives in a small town in an out-of-the-way valley where nothing much ever happens . . . except for the fact that they live near an evil Wood that occasional swallows trespassers, drives villagers mad, or sends monsters to destroy neighboring villages. Oh, and also they are protected by a wizard called the Dragon who lives in a tower and does his best to keep the evil magic of the Wood at bay. In return for his protection, the wizard takes one girl from the valley every ten years to serve him in the tower. These girls aren't killed, but they are never the same after their ten years of servitude, and they never stay in the valley when they are released. Something about their servitude changes them . . . Agnieszka worries for her best friend, Kasia, who is the most beautiful girl in the village. Everyone is sure Kasia will be snatched up by the Dragon at the next Choosing. Instead, much to her surprise, Agnieszka is chosen to serve the Dragon, and that's when she discovered how dark and frightening the world really is.Novik does a great job twisting our expectations -- inverting the tropes about fairy tale villains and heroes. You'll get magic and monsters, princes and wizards, sorcery and chivalry, but not always in the ways you might expect. Agnieszka has to go through some pretty horrible stuff. In fact, her story got worse so many times I had to put the book down a few times and catch my breath. This trip through the evil Wood is not for the faint of heart. But if you want a fantasy with strong characters and brilliantly original variations on ancient stories, try Uprooted!

This book is underwhelming AS FUCK.I'll probably be damned for saying this but screw sugar-coating. This book makes me so angry. Uprooted is one of those books with a pretty outside look full of sweet promises. Yes, sweet and yet they're EMPTY promises. The book covers scream 'BUY ME NOW OR REGRET IT FOR ALL ETERNITY' and the synopsis is so vague to the point of mystery. It lead me in to having such sky high expectations only later that I have those expectations thrown back into my fucking face.The beginning of the story started out really nicely in a whimsical fairytale sort of way. I thought this will be the next best thing to add into my Favourites shelf. But by the time I reached past 5 - 8% I had already lose my interest and started to wish that I had never, ever bothered with this.How I pretty much sum up the book: ONE STAR to character developments. I cannot stand any of them. Nearly all of them are as flat as a cardboard cutout. None experienced huge break throughs and if they did, it did not show in the book. The characters are none I can connect with and none I could care less about. My biggest pet peeves is that Agnieszka suffers a huge case of Special Snowflake Syndrome. She's been picked by The Dragon (who isn't an actual dragon or even a shapeshifter, to my disappointment) out of the blue because she has magical powers. Oh and somehow out of other people, she can survive longer in the Woods. "Youve been inexpressibly lucky, he [The Dragon/Sarkan] said finally. And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing. No one has gone into the Wood as deep as you and come out whole: not since He halted, and I somehow knew without his saying her name that it was Jaga: that Jaga had walked in the Wood, and come out again.' *exasperated sigh* ONE STAR to the ridiculous magic system. Not only is it ridiculous but it is FLAWED. This is probably just my personal preference but Magic comes with a price and in this case, once you magick something it only drains you bit by bit. It's hardly any price to pay. Some of the characters in the book are sorcerers/witches and they cast spells to make magic. Magic spells with IMPOSSIBLE ways to pronounce. "Zokinen valisu, akenezh hinisu, kozhonen valisu. "Ulozishtus sovjenta, megiot kozhor, ulozishtus megiot, ..... I dont know about you but that all goes 'agskdfsfvslmvdgwddnlkgsljkl' in my head. I refuse to even read the spells properly. I legit have no idea just how Novik expected her readers to read that. ONE STAR for the writing that is so messy, mediocre and tedious to read. Yes, tedious. It's all tilted to TELLING instead of SHOWING. I also have to endure paragraphs upon paragraphs of useless, unnecessary descriptions. I got so fucking bored I nearly fall dead asleep. There was nothing spectacular about the way Novik writes. ONE STAR to the non-existent chemistry between the Dragon and Agnieszka. It was bullshit. ZERO STAR to the love interest. If there's one thing I really hate, it's romance revolving around verbal and physical abuses. I swear, verbal abusing Agnieszka is the only language the Dragon knows how to speak in. First of all, he insulted her appearances. "The dirtiest thing in this tower is you," he said - true but unkind anyway. annnnd another jab of insult... "I do recall the girl neither horse-faced nor a slovenly mess." Yes, he just described her as 'horse-faced' to which Agnieszka retorted.... "Then you needn't keep me!" I flared, angry and wounded - horse-faced stung. Yet she still fucking fall for him anyway :-))Oh wait, there's more. The Dragon also insulted her by calling her an idiot every steps of the way. About more than THREE times in the book.More cases of abuse he showed the MC: 'He was irritated with me every time I came into his library, even on the few days that I managed to keep myself in good order: as though I were coming to annoy and interrupt him, instead of him tormenting and using me. And when he had finished working his magic through me and left me crumpled on the floor, he would scowl down at me and call me useless' He insulted her plain ways of dressing and forced her to re-dress for HIM in fancy gowns by using magic (which wears out Agnieszka a lot). In the end, she had to crawl on her knees and hands. Yes, he made her CRAWL back up to her own tower, exhausted.Why the fuck would you bother with the way she dressed up herself? Sarkan, you motherfucking creep. He called her intolerable and crazy in one sentence and then he kissed her. This is only the first kiss. "You intolerable lunatic, he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me. AWWW. ISN'T THAT JUST SO SWEET, AND SO FUCKING ROMANTIC?!?!?! WOW. I THINK I JUST DIED FROM SWOONING MY SOCKS OFF OVER THIS INSUFFERABLE JACKASS.The sex scene between them both happened out of nowhere and it was sooooo fucking unnecessary. It was like the book decided to throw in a little spice to their almost non-existent relationship. I got so baffled that Agnieszka would throw away her maidenhood over Sarkan whose behaviour do not even fucking improve afterwards.The fact that many gushed over The Dragon disturbed me. This dude is abusive. ABUSE IS NOT ROMANTIC. Verbal or physical otherwise. STOP THIS SHIT, AUTHORS. Place yourself in Agnieszka's shoes. Put more imaginations on how YOU would feel if you were being treated like all those ways I pointed out.This one treatment to Agnieszka is particularly the most terrible Sarkan had pulled out of his sleeve. 'He was on me in an instant, thrusting me flat down against my pillows. "So," he said, silkily, his hand pressed down upon my collarbone, pinning me easily to the bed . . . I was terrified . . . He shoved me hard against the bed and bent low."Don't dare lie to me!" he hissed. "I will tear the truth out of your throat-" his fingers were resting on my neck; his leg was on the bed, between mine.' How about you go fuck yourself, Sarkan?

There was a song in this forest, but it was a savage song, whispering of madness and tearing and rage.A girl locked in a tower, tangled up in sinister magic, threatened by power-hungry princes and all the while trying to stay true to herself.This was my first novel by Naomi Novik.While neither cover nor title really sparked my interest, the surprisingly high Goodreads rating and the plot summary finally did it for me.I picked this book up, expecting magic and romance in the fashion of Disney's Tangled. So I was (positively) surprised when the plot went another way.I highly enjoyed the first third of the book. Nieshka is so incredibly clumsy and totally refreshing. I had so much fun! Plot, setting and characters were promising and so I happily kept reading.I can't really say it went bad after that first part of the book, but I just couldn't enjoy it as much. There are a few things that kept nagging me: First of all, the main character struggled immensely with performing magic in the beginning. Until suddenly, from one second to the other, it came to her easily. She just said one single word and ta-da: Magic!Secondly, the plot suddenly went all over the place. The big bad Wood there, the Prince here, corruption, war, and so on. It was way too much for my taste, especially the ending. People kept dying, their deaths getting less and less shocking, and more and more unreal by the chapter.Anyway, I liked Uprooted, but while at first, it seemed like it was going to be a fantastic read, it didn't exceed my expectations.Find more of my books on Instagram

Reviewed by: Rabid ReadsImagine a powerful sorcerer living in a tower in the middle of a forest. He is over 150 years old, but he still appears to be a young man. Every 10 years, he picks a girl from one of the local villages to take back to his tower. The villagers say nothing, do nothing, b/c the sorcerer protects them from the Wood.The villagers don't know what happens to the girls during their time in the tower, only that they come back changed. Grander, finer, more polished. Educated and dressed in fine clothes. Different.The girls are well paid for whatever it is they do in the tower. Alone with the wizard. In the middle of the Wood. When they've served their sentence, they return with a sack of silver to use as a dowry, but they don't marry. At least not anyone from their former home. They all leave, using the money to finance a fresh start somewhere else.This sorcerer, called the Dragon, is alone except for the village girl, and even with her, he maintains his distance. She will age. She will die. He will do neither. Rather than forming attachments to impermanent creatures, he buries himself in order and precision and the resulting beauty of a task well done.His nature is taciturn, impatient, and formal, so the villagers, despite their dependence on him for protection, fear him, despise him:I had hated him, but I wouldn't have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn't a person . . . Agnieszka is the antithesis of this sorcerer, this Dragon. Left to his own devices, he would never have chosen her as his new companion, but Agnieszka has magic, and the King's Law states that any found with the talent must be trained, so choose her he does.What follows is a compelling combination of stagnation and rebirth, misunderstandings and revelations, the fantastical and the horrific, and all of it is utterly captivating.Tired literary devices felt new again:She kissed me again and held me once more, and let me go. It did hurt more. It did.I found myself reading and rereading the various passages. More than an image clearly formed in my mind, I felt what Agnieszka felt. I could have been her:I had forgotten hours and days by then. My arms ached, my back ached, my legs ached. My head ached worst of all, some part of me tethered back to the valley, stretched out of recognizable shape and trying to make sense of myself when I was so far from anything I knew. Even the mountains, my constants, had disappeared. Of course I'd known there were parts of the country with no mountains, but I'd imagined I would still see them somewhere in the distance, like the moon. But every time I looked behind me, they were smaller and smaller, until finally they disappeared with one final gasp of rolling hills. Novik perfectly captures human nature, plucking you from the physical world, and dropping you next to Agnieszka, making you an observer from within, so much more than a girl in a chair reading a book in Tennessee:"I'm glad," I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn't that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn't, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn't.And beyond the simple beauty of her words, she creates real, believably flawed people characters.Marek is a prince, not the crown prince, and he has no qualms about making his displeasure on that topic known, and when I met him . . . I didn't know what to think. He behaved abominably, but in a way that he himself wasn't absolutely abominable. Just self-interested. But redeemable. Until he isn't. Then suddenly you have hope for him again.It was a cycle that I completed several times, and in the end . . . I'm still undecided. But he was real. And he was one among many.Kasia is Agnieszka's best and only friend. She is also the girl that everyone expected the Dragon to choose. So imagine my dismay when shortly after she escapes that fate, she is abducted by one of the Wood's foul creatures. Now imagine Agnieszka's dismay.If you want to know whether or not Kasia is saved, you'll have to read the book for yourself (which you should do anyway, b/c AWESOME), but I will tell you that Agnieszka finds something in the Wood, and that something reminds me of one of my favorite Christian Schloe illustrations:Fantastic(al), right? The whole book is like that.UPROOTED by Naomi Novik is part fantasy, part fairy story, and all wonder. I haven't been as enamored by a tale since I was child, and though this is not a children's story, I still found myself smitten like a girl with ribbons in her hair, twirling in her favorite dress in the sunshine. This is a story that has carved it's place on my heart, and I enthusiastically endorse it as my top read of 2015.