The protagonist of Uprooted is Agnieszka, a rural peasant girl growing up in a valley next to The Wood, a mysterious and hostile forest. The residents of the valley rely on the local wizard, known as The Dragon, to protect them from The Wood. In payment, the Dragon takes a 17 year old girl once every ten years to live with him. No-one knows what the (very long lived) Dragon does with these girls, except that at the end of their decade with him they do not wish to stay in the valley and return to their old village life.
As we enter the story, the decade is coming to an end and the Dragon will soon choose his next girl. Agnieszka is of the right age but does not expect to be selected due to the presence of her friend Kasia, who is beautiful and talented and has been groomed by expectations of her choosing for many years. To everyone's surprise but the reader the Dragon turns up and chooses Agnieszka who is whisked off to live as part servant, part student in the Dragon's tower. For Agnieszka turns out to have some facility with magic and it is the Dragon's obligation to tutor her in it.
The rest of the book then takes some interesting trails through what is otherwise familiar territory. The Dragon is forced to deal with the young and feisty Agnieszka and must un-learn some of his curmudgeonly ways. Agnieszka must learn to let go of her plans for her life, while fighting to keep intact her ties to the people of her village. The Dragon turns out to be a poor tutor for Agnieszka as her magical powers take a different but complementary form to his own and she must turn instead to a book written by the mysterious Baba Jaga. Together, they must learn to confront the forces that live inside The Wood before those forces overwhelm their entire world.
Novik writes very well which makes for a very brisk read. The Eastern European setting, while not differing tremendously from the standard Western European medieval fantasy, adds an interesting flavor to the mix. I found Agnieszka to be very likeable, and thought the character behaved intelligently and reasonably in light of the information she has available to her. If this sounds like I am damning with faint praise, it is not intended to be that way: far too often I find myself bouncing off a fantasy novel because I do not find the characters' actions believable. That is not a problem here.
As the book reaches its climax, there is a predictable (dare I say clichéd?) digression into a discussion of how humanity's contempt for nature is the root cause (pardon the pun) of evil lurking within The Wood. But just when I was afraid that the book was going to veer off into some sort of environmental screed, the book recovers and ends with the neutral message that nature and humanity need to find a balance, with nature accepting the inevitability of "progress". This is not the sort of heavy handed message fiction complained about by the Sad and Rabid Puppies.
Overall, I enjoyed this book a lot. It was a fun read populated with compelling characters, with enough differences from the typical fantasy to make it seem fresh. On my patented rating scale, that makes it a "very good" ...
R4 Rating: 8 out of 10.
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