Uprooted

Author: Naomi Novik
Genre: Fantasy, Retelling, Young Adult
Page Count: 438 (Paperback Edition)
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“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.”

This book took my heart and I don’t want it back.

Imagine reading Howl’s Moving Castle only fewer safety nets and more danger, a good amount of humor and a bountiful of magic. Now, imagine it combined with Beauty and the Beast, a tinge of a fairytale with its horrors, darker, and drunkenly enchanting.

The book started out as fun, and intriguing. The spotlight was on The Dragon and the tributes offered to him, there wasn’t much told about the real enemy – The Woods, and in it, lies the heart of it, that fuels the woods to do evil. As the story unfolds, the real enemy was uncloaked. It’s evil revealed. If you’re familiar with Cassandra Clare, you’ve probably read about The Seelie Queen, despite her manipulations and evil schemes, I like that character of CC. She felt more like a fairy tale to me than Novik’s Wood Queen. The Wood Queen is scary, ten times eerie than the Seelie Queen, with horrifying wood powers. Then there are The Walkers, imagine Groot has gone berserk with rage, it’s like reading the Tree from A Monster Calls, only ten folds haunting.

Amidst all the comparison I’ve used, Uprooted is a gem, a gold. Something worth cherished. This book has whisked me to the magical world of Polnya, its villages, the people, the Wizards, the King, his Kingdom, and his heirs and its history. Each character mattered, and the deaths of some characters was a blow to my heart to my gut and to my soul. At some point, the book was too much to handle. Too much death, too much magic, mistake after another, its like fighting on an endless war, an unwinnable one. That feeling of hopelessness, it was like sharing the weight of the burden the characters are carrying. I felt like I was part of the story, not just a spectator from the outside. And even after I thought I understood who the enemy is, I was presented with another set of surprising revelations, the Whys and Hows fell perfectly in place. Suddenly, there is hope, the doubt and impossibility always linger but there is hope. I love how this book turned out, I wanted to cry but I don’t know how to start and if I could I may not be able to stop ( dramatic I know, but wth), there is a hollowness in my heart, the sign that this book took a part of me, the ending, I just wanted more of that ending and I so loved it, how everything went well or rather, how everything will be alright after what has happened. Polnya will soon have a brighter future, together with the neighboring Kingdoms.

I just hope Ms. Novik will revisit this world. To bring us back to this magical tale, to whisk us back to (hopefully more concluding story of) Sarkan, Agnieszka, Kasia, Solya, Alosha and everyone else. Their names were a struggle for me, but I didn’t make me love the book less, there was simply nothing to hate about Uprooted.