Bokrecension: Naomi Novik - Uprooted

In Uprooted Novik paints a rich fairy tale landscape, breaking the tradition of some tropes and embracing others. In it we meet the girls Agnieszka and Kasia, best friends born in the village of Dvernik in a country named Polnya, a fantastical and slightly twisted depiction of historical Poland. Every ten years Dvernik has to sacrifice a young maiden to a dragon in return for his protection from a dark, corrupted wood. In some parts a very recognizable premise which this book shapes to its own purposes and creates a dragon which is not a dragon, but a man. An ageless wizard. Everyone expect him to choose the beautiful Kasia as his servant, but instead chooses awkward, earthly would-be-witch Agnieszka. Little does she knows the role she will play in stopping the crawling borders of the wood, and the intricate traps within traps the wood will set for her as revenge.

Uprooted reminded me slightly of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation with the dreamlike/nightmarish description the wood. But while Annihilation is a book of the new weird sub-genre, depicting the search for a scientific explanation for the change that has happened to Area X, Uprooted is more a tale of the old weird, fondly taking inspiration from European folk lore and firmly rooting its horror in the realm of magic and fantasy.

This was a greatly enjoyable book; engaging, quick and easy to read. It’s a fairy tale portraying real characters with real motivations. No one in this novel is truly evil, but very human with human flaws and making human mistakes. They each have their own agendas, but the things that drive them are things you can understand and sometimes sympathise with. Maybe even cry when you learn of the tragedies that lies behind it all.

And yet I do not give this book a full five stars because, while entertaining, it failed to really “wow” me. The world didn’t stay with me the times I put the book down, however much I enjoyed it while reading. I didn’t go through my day pondering it’s riddles. This may, of course, not have been the book’s intention to begin with, but I did expect it’s setting to awe me more than it ended up doing.

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