First edition, 438 pages
English language
Published May 19, 2015 by Del Rey.
"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 use every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we're grateful, but not that grateful."
I loved this twist on the classic dark fairy tale. Young woman taken by the Dragon, check. Apprentice learning to handle power they never knew they had, check. And yet Novik makes it all feel brand new.
Reminds me of early Patricia Briggs, Patricia McKillip, Patricia Wrede, Bujold's Challion stuff, Robyn McKinley... you get the picture.
Quite decent and readable, and I particularly enjoyed the multiple distinct female characters and the relationships between them, the recognition of the creepiness of the maiden in the tower trope, even where creepiness was averted, and the use of Russian traditions, even though they are not a tradition I am familiar with.
Story: Agnieszka is selected to be the village sorcerer's girl-captive, and goes not very gracefully to her fate. She finds herself a terrible captive/housekeeper, but learns about magic, and her world, which comes in handy when the creepy woods which have been trying to consume them all makes its next attempt.
One of the most fascinating characters was Kasia, the girl everyone had assumed would be the next Girl Captive. It strikes me that she would have a fascinating …
Reminds me of early Patricia Briggs, Patricia McKillip, Patricia Wrede, Bujold's Challion stuff, Robyn McKinley... you get the picture.
Quite decent and readable, and I particularly enjoyed the multiple distinct female characters and the relationships between them, the recognition of the creepiness of the maiden in the tower trope, even where creepiness was averted, and the use of Russian traditions, even though they are not a tradition I am familiar with.
Story: Agnieszka is selected to be the village sorcerer's girl-captive, and goes not very gracefully to her fate. She finds herself a terrible captive/housekeeper, but learns about magic, and her world, which comes in handy when the creepy woods which have been trying to consume them all makes its next attempt.
One of the most fascinating characters was Kasia, the girl everyone had assumed would be the next Girl Captive. It strikes me that she would have a fascinating story in her. Also I would not turn down the Kasia/Agnieszka fanfiction.
I was vaguely sad to see reconciliation with Agnieszka's romantic interest in the last chapter, because I had actually been pleased by her "fuck all'y'all, I'm going to go be a crazy witch lady in the woods" exit.
This book reminds me of Trudy Canavan's Magicians Trilogy. I thought it was supposed to be some kind of fairy-tale-mashup-retelling thing but I seem to have gotten that wrong. It's the classic fantasy coming of age story as oh so many others with very little unpredictable things happening. Young girl is taken away from her family, discovers - unsurprisingly - that she has magical talent, falls in love with her teacher (seems to be a trope that is starting to weird me out), blunders around in the big (city) politics for a while but eventually manages to save the day and beat back the big bad wood. Voilà happy ending. It wasn't written badly, but there was also little to set the story apart from others. It's a short, somewhat entertaining read, and a couple of sex scenes that made me wonder about the target audience for a while.
I …
This book reminds me of Trudy Canavan's Magicians Trilogy. I thought it was supposed to be some kind of fairy-tale-mashup-retelling thing but I seem to have gotten that wrong. It's the classic fantasy coming of age story as oh so many others with very little unpredictable things happening. Young girl is taken away from her family, discovers - unsurprisingly - that she has magical talent, falls in love with her teacher (seems to be a trope that is starting to weird me out), blunders around in the big (city) politics for a while but eventually manages to save the day and beat back the big bad wood. Voilà happy ending. It wasn't written badly, but there was also little to set the story apart from others. It's a short, somewhat entertaining read, and a couple of sex scenes that made me wonder about the target audience for a while.
I did not like the magic in this book at all. While it was described beautifully - they are using incantations from books, and singing - it didn't make much sense. The magic seemed to do whatever the author needed it to do at the moment. While some of the more important plot element magic was established early on there seemed to be no limit to what magic could do. It did seem to be somewhat exhausting but that was about it. If there was more to it, it didn't make the book.
In the second half of the book in which the hero has to leave her teacher to fight the wood alone, she goes to the city to get help from the king. While the first half of the book has only a handful of characters who are introduced one by one, as she gets to the city I was overwhelmed with all the politics, names and characters especially those of all the magicians she meets.
Maybe I just read this book at the wrong time, but it was not for me.
This isn't one of Novik's Temeraire books. It's a fantasy that turns the "village sacrifices a girl to appease the dragon" trope entirely on its head. To start with, the Dragon is the name of a sorcerer who protects the community against an evil Wood that makes Tolkien's Mirkwood seem benign. The girl isn't sacrificed, but must work for the Dragon for 10 years, after which she usually leaves the valley for the city to go to university or otherwise lead a nice life.
I fell in love with the narrator's voice immediately. She's a messy, tomboyish girl who no one expects to be picked by the sorcerer, but she is. The book springs off into adventure, part knights with war horses and swords and part Baba Yaga. The characters are 3-dimensional, even the ones you want to hate. I loved this book.
Highly entertaining, fast-paced book. I read it on a whim and found it hard to put down. I enjoyed the Eastern European folklore references. All in all simply a good book.
Highly entertaining, fast-paced book. I read it on a whim and found it hard to put down. I enjoyed the Eastern European folklore references. All in all simply a good book.
Oh. This was SO WONDERFUL. Wow.
http://fedpeaches.blogspot.com/2015/06/do-you-ever-get-out-of-wood.html
When my sister and I were little girls our cousin gave us a beautifully battered old copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales with the dessicated exoskeleton of a spider crushed between the pages. There is some possibility that my deep love of this dark, creepy book warped me for life. It was not the sunny nonsense that my well-meaning relatives kept trying to spoon-feed me. Characters faced real dangers and had actual horrible consequences. The wolf was not always defeated and the evil stepmother's spells had some real bite.
I'm always in search of dark fantasy that grabs me the way that old copy of Grimm's did, so I signed up to get an ARC of Naomi Novik's Uprooted from NetGalley, hoping it fit the bill. For the most part it did not disappoint. We have our protagonist Agnieszka, the woodcutter's daughter who is swept away to the tower of The …
When my sister and I were little girls our cousin gave us a beautifully battered old copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales with the dessicated exoskeleton of a spider crushed between the pages. There is some possibility that my deep love of this dark, creepy book warped me for life. It was not the sunny nonsense that my well-meaning relatives kept trying to spoon-feed me. Characters faced real dangers and had actual horrible consequences. The wolf was not always defeated and the evil stepmother's spells had some real bite.
I'm always in search of dark fantasy that grabs me the way that old copy of Grimm's did, so I signed up to get an ARC of Naomi Novik's Uprooted from NetGalley, hoping it fit the bill. For the most part it did not disappoint. We have our protagonist Agnieszka, the woodcutter's daughter who is swept away to the tower of The Dragon at the age of seventeen to start ten years of servitude. Perfectly excellent start to a fairy tale and I enjoyed watching our girl step into the world of magic by learning of her own hidden powers, which again is a very pleasing coming of age and into her own sort of fantasy storyline. This tower and the villages nearby are surrounded by The Wood, a deliciously creepy sentient place from when evil springs, where villagers get snatched and lured to either death or a fate worse than. All fine and good and very entertaining reading. It sent me back to my happy place and reminded me of the Grimm brothers in the best ways.
I greatly enjoyed watching Agnieszka grow into her power and butt heads with the Dragon over her inability to follow simple spellbooks in favor of her own intuitive style of casting spells. Learning more about how The Wood encroached upon human settlements and how it threatened to destroy them in so many varied ways kept me turning pages well past my bedtime. Once Agnieszka, the Dragon, and an intrepid band of royals and soldier decide to take on The Wood to destroy it once and for all I found that the pacing suffered. The book would have benefited from some harsher editing to keep things humming along. From time to time it felt like I was slogging through an RPG game, watching my characters repeat certain spells in order to level up enough to face the boss. Overall, though, the strengths outweighed the weakness and I really enjoyed the book. Those of you who prefer the battle scenes of sword and sorcery novels will probably enjoy Uprooted even more than I did, so four stars for me with the potential to add another half star for some of my more bloodthirsty friends.
