Uprooted

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OH MY GOD A DRAGON. A TERRIBLE DRAGON WHO KIDNAPS A VILLAGE'S BEAUTIFUL YOUNG GIRLS. DO THEY GET EATEN?! DO THEY GET TORTURED?!!! WHAT IS THEIR TERRIBLE FATE?! “They forget how to live here...[they] remember to be afraid,” my father said. That was all. Johns, Andreas (1998). "Baba Yaga and the Russian Mother". The Slavic and East European Journal. American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. 42 (1): 21–36. doi: 10.2307/310050. JSTOR 310050. Uprooted has everything I love: a great heroine, new takes on old myths and legends, and surprising twists and turns. A delight.”—Cassandra Clare

I'll tell you right now: I was rather a bit upset that the big bad is an evil forest, but the idea is much older than all our modern tree-hugging sympathies, so in effect it still came across as something fresh. How odd! 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.” As a love story, it's mild and cute. As a retelling of the evil forest mythos featuring Baba Yaga (or Jaga in the text,) it's strong as hell and always on target. As a story, it had strong plots and steady progression, right down through the training, to the introduction to the kingdom, to the Main Reversal, to the Next Reversal, to the dire oh-shit-this-has-gotten-crazy reveal. Ok, from the blurb, you probably think that the story centers around a guy named Dragon (or a dragon named Guy?) and the girl he falls in love with...fairytale style.His nature is taciturn, impatient, and formal, so the villagers, despite their dependence on him for protection, fear him, despise him: although i know, with my logic-brain and my experiences and my readers’ advisory training, that not every book is going to “work” for every reader, i always feel a little bit guilty, a little bit broken, when a wildly popular book i had every expectation of loving falls short for me.

There are those well-drawn, vivid books that have great world-building, beautiful descriptions without being overly descriptive, and get lauded by critics. Then there are those books that are delicious chocolate-ice-cream-with-sprinkles pieces of entertainment that drag you in and just provide so much enjoyment. Uprooted is a rare beast - because it's both. its hooks hooked me: it’s a fairytaleish book with a spooky forest and a mysterious castle and an enigmatic wizard and a village with a long-standing and creepy tradition of gifting a young woman to the enigmatic wizard in the mysterious castle every ten years. 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. I wrote this review 5 years ago at the age of 17. I don't think my opinion of this book has ever changed. I still do maintain my stance as to why I thoroughly disliked reading this book, but now that I'm at a much older age than I was before, I'd like to give a disclaimer to not let the extreme profanities my 17-year-old self had wrote to translate through your opinion of the story, characters, etc.hmmmm...you are a tree, you have leaves. You grow branches...You are a tree...grow...grow...You are a tree and have leaves and branches...You are a tree...hmmm

The Fifth Season still leads, followed closely with Uprooted. I've still got a few other titles to read, but I can tell you that Ancillary Mercy will be somewhere in the middle and Updraft will trail at the bottom. But of course, there's more to Ag-noying than meets the eye, why, she's got magical power that's just waiting to burst from her like a rose from a fermenting pile of steaming poop. My strength welled up through my body and fountained out of my mouth, and where it left me, a trembling in the air began and went curling down around my body in a spiraling path.Yeah, yeah. I've read this shit before, and I say no, thank you. I like my main characters average, thank you very much. I like my "Dragons" with humanity. A sense of nostalgia hangs over the tale as the world changes inevitably and we learn of entire villages and civilizations disappearing forever. But there is also a sense of hope in spite of all the darkness, of wonder and discovery, of healing and renewal. A hope for an end of the vicious cycle of violence. 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:

WINNER OF THE NEBULA AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL •NAOMI NOVIK, author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Temeraire novels, introduces a bold new world rooted in folk stories and legends, as elemental as a Grimm fairy tale. a b c Nepveu, Kate (10 June 2015). "Naomi Novik's Uprooted Isn't The Book I Expected — It's Better". Tor.com . Retrieved 12 November 2022. This novel is too dense. It's too layered and runs from one plot to another without giving us time to digest the previous one, making this one tough cookie to swallow. When it's not the overly descriptive surroundings, it's the tedious never ending rendition of magic, one that, by the way, still left a lot to be desired. A friend had previously warned me about the writing style but I did not heed caution cause in my mind you don't have to be a poet to woo me. But crap, you at least have to have some finesse.

The Wood herself becomes a character, fierce and vengeful, creepy and cunning, and so powerful. Magic pours out of this beautiful story about villages and woods, towers and castles, armies and witches, and the more we learn of this world, the more we want to know. 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. Also, one of my favourite things was the creepy Wood - a literally evil forest that is alive with a dark corruption that will claim you if you ever enter it, or get touched by one of the monstrous beings that come out of the Wood. How weird and creative and scary... I LOVED it. Thaker, Aruna; Barton, Arlene (2012). Multicultural Handbook of Food, Nutrition and Dietetics. John Wiley & Sons. p.288. ISBN 978-1118350461.everyone raved, everyone who knew my tastes said i would love it, and on paper, i should have loved it. but i struggled. Genevieve Valentine, reviewing the book in The New York Times, writes that the coming-of-age tale is a "messier" story, deeper than the "bright, forthright" and somewhat mythic teenage books that it might call to mind. In her view, Novik "skillfully takes the fairy-tale-turned- bildungsroman structure of her premise" and develops it into "a very enjoyable fantasy with the air of a modern classic." [16] Guys, I know I'm late to the party, but this book was so worthy of all the stars. I'm still goo-goo eyed at how beautiful and breathtaking the writing is; saying it is atmospheric and quirky and full of heart and soul doesn't even do it justice, but I'm not sure there are proper words in the english language to convey the feelings this book gave me. Right after I finished this one, Mr. Humphrey asked me what it was about and I stuttered and stumbled through some semblance of a description because HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE THIS BOOK? Everything I said made no sense, just as this review will likely make little to no sense, but I'll try my best to convince you to give this one a try if you enjoy a fantasy that is equal parts tenderness and epic growth.