Uprooted

J'ai adoré le personnage principal et sa relation avec son amie. Là où il y aurait pu avoir de la jalousie entre Kasia et Agnieszka parce que cette dernière à été choisie alors que tout portait à croire que ce serait Kasia, il y avait à la place de la solidarité et une très belle amitié. J'aime bien (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)⁠✧⁠*⁠。

L'histoire est sympa aussi. Droite au but, le monde sert au scénario et le scénario sert au monde. Le Worldbuilding n'est peut-être pas ultra développé mais il est cohérent et surtout suffisamment expliqué pour que les difficultés et le solutions d'Agnieszka ne ressemblent à des Deus Ex Machina. Donc très bien pour moi, il m'a fait rêver (⁠◕⁠ᴗ⁠◕⁠✿⁠)

Pour ce qui est de l'écriture, rien à redire. C'est compréhensible, c'est lisible, c'est pas compliqué à lire et ça m'a fait autant rêver que le monde donc pouce en l'air pour cette partie là aussi ⁠\⁠0⁠/⁠

Seul petit bémol, c'est la relation à la fin avec Agnieszka et son prétendant. Je trouvais ça cliché, et c'est arrivé donc j'étais un peu désabusé. J'aurais préféré que cela reste platonique... Mais c'est minime comme défaut (perso) ...donc bon

Bref, un chouette roman. Je suis contente de l'avoir lu (⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠)

This book is very, very close to perfect. Novik's prose is stunning. Reading Uprooted felt like watching the Howl's Moving Castle movie again. In fact, this book felt very similar to Howl's Moving Castle, with a bit more of the plot happening outside of the tower.

The characters in this book were stunning. I thought Sarkan was goofy in the best way possible (he's the most serious character ever, lol), and adored Kasia. Even the villain was written so beautifully I felt her connections to the valley in the way I feel connected to my own home. There are so many themes of love and connection in this book that reading it filled me with so much joy. It was genuinely difficult to put down, that hasn't happened to me in ages.

I've read some other reviews for this book (the one-stars seem popular) and I definitely see where they're coming from with Agnieszka being a mary-sue and annoying. She definitely wasn't the best character in the story, but I consider this book like a sweet guilty-pleasure read. If you let yourself get lost in it then those nit-picky details aren't so glaring that they ruin the story. I know they didn't ruin it for me. :) My one complaint is that sometimes the pacing of the book would rush forwards. This was most notable right when Agnieszka is taken by the Dragon. I had to flip back and forth between pages for a moment wondering what happened. I did enjoy all of the twists and turns the book took. Novik kept me on my toes the whole time.

4.5/5 rounded down simply because I need to chew on this book a little bit more before giving it five stars. I recommend this book for people who enjoyed Howls Moving Castle and other fairy tale romances, those who enjoy magic and nature, and books that tie up nicely with the theme of love and community.

I added Uprooted to my TBR list two and a half years ago when a now-defunct book blog raved about it. I was intrigued by the synopsis and their enthusiasm, but promptly got distracted with other books and forgot all about it. What a mistake! When I finally got to reading Uprooted this week, I absolutely loved every page. Essentially a young adult/adult fairytale, Uprooted is set in a richly detailed land of witches and wizards, malevolent forests, and tiny village communities. Its era is that any-time of Grimm fairy tales and Novik's story, although newly written, has a wonderfully timeless quality.

Agnieszka is a refreshingly different female lead - untidy and clumsy, talented and self willed. I appreciated seeing her mature throughout the novel, but growing in to her own woman - not becoming a painted clone of idealised femininity! Despite men holding the positions of power in this patriarchal society, it is women who drive the story and every one felt authentic to me. I happily lost myself in Novik's gorgeously imagined scenes. She expertly imparts her imagined world so that it leaps from the pages. The battles and near-escapes are breathtakingly exciting and I loved the intensity of the spellcastings too. Uprooted might just be my book of the month!

So my "recommended to me" notes for Uprooted were " A feminist twist on an Eastern European fairytale with interesting characters and a compelling magic system" and, it's...mostly as billed. But my personal kryptonite is immortal (or super old) character falls in love with a teenager. It bursts through my suspension of disbelief, my engagement with a book and just makes me want to set everything on fire. To add insult to injury, Uprooted also repeats the "guy is super dismissive to girl and she falls in love with him anyway" trope that I first met in Spinning Silver. In Spinning Silver it was haunting and evocative of the frozen tundra of the setting. Seeing it again from the same author? I think it's just her schtick and it made me not like Spinning Silver as much in retrospect. I resent that a lot.

But there are other parts of Novik's schtick I like: the interaction between magic and a place; the way a place shapes a people; strong female friendships between female characters with complementary strengths and profoundly evocative settings. Do they balance? Hard to say.

Novik can write. So there's that.

This is a light thing, a romance - I don't mean love although there is that too.

It is a heavy thing, monstrosities lurking beneath clear waters.

At first reading it seems to be running in Angela Carter territory, and to be informed by Maria Tatar, Jack Zipes and Marian Warner.

Now I've read it for the second time. It's as if Granny Weatherwax were to have been apprenticed to one of the professors at the Unseen University. Novik does rather labour her binarities : Apollonian vs Dionysian, male vs female, particular vs universal and so on. There's also a sense that the author changes her mind about what to do with certain of her characters; the King and the Crown Prince are set up as actors and then just drop out of the tale. Similarly, one of the court wizards is introduced in some detail, then disappears without having done anything. Loaded guns litter the stage while the main characters carry on regardless.

However, the book carries the reader along with it, and is pleasurable to read. It doesn't quite have Carter's way with words, or the keen critique that informed her work: like so much fantasy writing it is overly constrained by the courtly conventions of the polite fairy tale, despite nodding at the grimmer side of Grimm.

This seems to be one of those very polarizing books where you love it or hate it, and nothing in between. Personally, I loved it; I started it on the weekend and had about 100 pages left when I had to go to work this morning. Couldn't stop thinking about the plot all the way through work, and couldn't wait to get home again to finally finish it off. Based on the multiple prestigious awards it's won, I'm clearly not alone in this. If you enjoy beautifully written fairy tale stories with a bit of darkness - if you loved Robin McKinley's "Door in the Hedge" for example - you'll likely adore this book. If, on the other hand, you prefer the sunny Disney versions of fairy tales, or you find the Beauty and the Beast romance deeply troublesome, you probably won't like this.

I have to admit the heroine is a little bit of a Mary Sue - an ordinary everywoman who turns out to be somehow special and gifted. And the Dragon can be read as a bit of a Beast figure, depending how sympathetically you choose to read him. But most protagonists of fairy tales are Mary Sues and Special Snowflakes, it's almost a stable of the genre and I was okay with it here. The story is a fantastic tapestry that keeps you feeling as if you ALMOST recognize a bit of an old fairy story you know, but then twists it away again. There were echoes of Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty, and Briar Rose, and various Russian folk tales, but none of them quite turning out the way you expect, and in the end it turns into a story entirely standing on its own. I'd love to read more about the world and these characters, but it ends satisfactorily for a stand-alone story and I don't know if there's any intention to continue it.

I would definitely say this is a teen book, not for younger kids, as there are definitely dark themes that would scare kids - necromancy at one point, and violent fighting with lots of soldiers dying - and also one sex scene. But it's mostly a beautifully written and absorbing story about magic and politics and people making the wrong decisions for the right reasons and of course the protagonists trying to save the world against all odds. I really enjoyed Novik's Temeraire series and enjoyed this one even more, can't wait till her next book!