Until she's the one that's chosen. Until she shows magical aptitude. Until she's the only one who can stop the Wood's sinister plans. Until everything she thought she knew about her future is uprooted and tossed aside like so many weeds. Now she's treading a path so overgrown that the last person that could have possibly walked it was Baba Jaga herself, and the Wood is closing in.
I picked this book up after a patron recommended it to me a few years ago. I had been lamenting the lack of many fantasy novels built up around Russian and eastern European folklore and mythology. Fantasy is full of stories based on the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, and more diverse folklores and mythologies are being introduced these days, but eastern Europe is only remembered for its vampires. The patron, an English teacher and fantasy aficionado himself, recommended that I give this book a whirl, and I'm grateful for his recommendation.
The book uses Russian folklore as a trellis on which to hang the vines of the story. The Dragon, Sarkan, immediately calls to mind the story of Koschei the Deathless (and if you haven't started listening to the Myths and Legends Podcast where this story is recited, you really should). He is a powerful wizard-lord that takes young, beautiful women away with him, imprisons them in his tower and...well, no one really knows what he does with them, but they assume that they're not playing endless hands of euchre. The heroine, Agniezka, sets herself to mirror Baba Yaga, although not the scary wicked witch Baba Yaga that I'm familiar with. Her "Jaga" is more Granny Weatherwax than Wicked Witch of the West. But it quickly develops a lore all its own that's both new and familiar at the same time.
I liked the pacing of this book. Novik doesn't get bogged down in intricate world-building and political machinations, so she's able to keep the story chugging along at a regular pace that rises and falls in a natural rhythm. I get the feeling that she is able to do this because she is locking the reader into the point of view of Agniezka, whose magic and experience of the world is more in tune with the natural rhythm of life and the world around her. Had she chosen to tell the story through The Dragon's point of view, we probably would have been subjected to endless lectures of history and political affiliation, but that's just my own speculation.
I enjoyed the way that the characters grew and changed over the course of the story - Agniezka went from a self-doubting peasant girl out of her element to a confident witch-woman who fully embraces her magic and way of doing things, and The Dragon goes from an aloof, arrogant jerk of a wizard to the more approachable, fallible man Sarkan. Even minor characters showed development, or the consequences of arrested development in the case of Prince Marek.
The only thing I didn't like about this book was the way that the romance, and I use that term hesitantly, was developed. I didn't feel like it was really "love" so much as "magic-based lust" - mingling of magics creates a similar desire to mingle other things, so it wasn't so much that the characters were in love as it was that they were intertwined by other intimacies. It wasn't bad writing, I just felt that there wasn't any necessity to include a sex scene. It always feels voyeuristic to read them, and an exhaustive description of a sexual encounter rarely furthers the plot. Still, it's only three pages you have to skip instead of half a chapter, so it's really just a minor complaint.
If you were a fan of the Tiffany Aching books by (GNU) Terry Pratchett, you'll enjoy this one. Agniezka and Tiffany have a lot of similarities, particularly in their intuitive understanding of magic. For readers looking for a good fantasy read that are unwilling to commit to a long-running series that might not get finished anytime soon, Uprooted is a good choice because the whole thing is contained in a single book with no dangling threads to hint at a second or third volume. For those of you who lamented, as I did, that eastern Europe is only known for vampires - check this out. You'll be glad you did.
The book uses Russian folklore as a trellis on which to hang the vines of the story. The Dragon, Sarkan, immediately calls to mind the story of Koschei the Deathless (and if you haven't started listening to the Myths and Legends Podcast where this story is recited, you really should). He is a powerful wizard-lord that takes young, beautiful women away with him, imprisons them in his tower and...well, no one really knows what he does with them, but they assume that they're not playing endless hands of euchre. The heroine, Agniezka, sets herself to mirror Baba Yaga, although not the scary wicked witch Baba Yaga that I'm familiar with. Her "Jaga" is more Granny Weatherwax than Wicked Witch of the West. But it quickly develops a lore all its own that's both new and familiar at the same time.
I liked the pacing of this book. Novik doesn't get bogged down in intricate world-building and political machinations, so she's able to keep the story chugging along at a regular pace that rises and falls in a natural rhythm. I get the feeling that she is able to do this because she is locking the reader into the point of view of Agniezka, whose magic and experience of the world is more in tune with the natural rhythm of life and the world around her. Had she chosen to tell the story through The Dragon's point of view, we probably would have been subjected to endless lectures of history and political affiliation, but that's just my own speculation.
I enjoyed the way that the characters grew and changed over the course of the story - Agniezka went from a self-doubting peasant girl out of her element to a confident witch-woman who fully embraces her magic and way of doing things, and The Dragon goes from an aloof, arrogant jerk of a wizard to the more approachable, fallible man Sarkan. Even minor characters showed development, or the consequences of arrested development in the case of Prince Marek.
The only thing I didn't like about this book was the way that the romance, and I use that term hesitantly, was developed. I didn't feel like it was really "love" so much as "magic-based lust" - mingling of magics creates a similar desire to mingle other things, so it wasn't so much that the characters were in love as it was that they were intertwined by other intimacies. It wasn't bad writing, I just felt that there wasn't any necessity to include a sex scene. It always feels voyeuristic to read them, and an exhaustive description of a sexual encounter rarely furthers the plot. Still, it's only three pages you have to skip instead of half a chapter, so it's really just a minor complaint.
If you were a fan of the Tiffany Aching books by (GNU) Terry Pratchett, you'll enjoy this one. Agniezka and Tiffany have a lot of similarities, particularly in their intuitive understanding of magic. For readers looking for a good fantasy read that are unwilling to commit to a long-running series that might not get finished anytime soon, Uprooted is a good choice because the whole thing is contained in a single book with no dangling threads to hint at a second or third volume. For those of you who lamented, as I did, that eastern Europe is only known for vampires - check this out. You'll be glad you did.
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