What I liked:
The best thing about this book is the narrative beauty of Novik’s writing. For a YA novel, the quality of the prose is so far above the rest of the genre as to almost eclipse it entirely. I re-read sentences because of their pure lush beauty. Each sentence jumps off the page, and no words ever feel wasted. The best passages are the ones describing the main character’s experiences performing magic. Novik spins elaborate, overarching metaphors, for example, the first time the two central characters do magic together: “On an impulse I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing steam driving it around.” As the main character’s magical skill grows, so does the complexity of these metaphors, until each spell has the architectural grandiosity of a church, but also the earthy verdance of a greenhouse. It’s breath-taking, and I haven’t really read anything like it before. It almost makes up for the fact that the magical system isn’t particularly well-developed otherwise.
It’s a dark fairytale, which means that there are a lot of vile beasties that come crawling out of a menacing Wood to attack the main characters. These beasties are no joke: there’s burning flesh, foaming at the mouth, and a whole lot of other supernatural gore that’d be right at home in The Witcher. It’s not gross, but it ain’t comfy. The novel doesn’t just borrow from Polish mythology, it grows from that soil, in a way that’s both unusual and absorbing.
I liked the descriptions of war. Stendhal is famous for writing descriptions of war that actually capture its horror, but Novik deserves a place alongside him. The battles - whether they feature human or supernatural combatants - are brutal, bloody and devastating. The story makes a little too much noise about how it doesn’t hew to the usual vague and vainglorious narratives of armed conflict, but that doesn’t change the fact that the battles pack a punch. They feel awful. You don’t want to be in them. That’s a victory for the writer.
The characters grabbed me, even the quippy professor. He shouldn’t have been cast as the romantic lead, but if that hadn’t happened, I could have seen a lovely teacher-student arc here that offered development and growth for both characters. The main character is real and developed. Her roots in her valley are authentic and interesting. In a genre that often operates on a grand scale, and turns on the conflict between home and the “other” (whether that’s outer space, etc), this novel offers a refreshing example of someone who doesn’t really leave “home” in order to become a hero. One of the themes the book explores beautifully is this idea of being “rooted”, and in this area, the key characters all operate as foils to each other. The professor is always on the move, living behind stone walls. The main character embraces humanity and its ties to the earth. Her best friend, a classic support character, nonetheless finds identity and meaning somewhere else. The book begins by saying that the girls whom the wizard “takes” all eventually leave the valley; the narrator is taken but defies the trend. In itself, this is meaningful; in itself, it’s worth having.
What I didn’t like:
The story contains a romance, and the romance is not. good. It's believable, and there are elements of fantasy to it, but it’s also retro, unimaginative, and morally suspect. The main character - a 17-year-old girl - falls in love with her teacher. He’s a classic (TV) Sherlock-ian asshat, complete with social anxiety issues. He’s sarcastic and unkind, and spends the first half of the novel insulting her intelligence and abilities. His character doesn't really grow or develop at all, and it’s unclear exactly what these two see in each other. I've never cared for this type of Byronic hero - I think I was the only one who read “Jane Eyre” and was rooting for John St. John over Mr. Rochester (to be clear, I didn't like EITHER of them, but everything about Mr. Rochester irritated the fuck out of me and I didn't like that Jane chose him). It's a bit of an "insta-love" (a term I've never heard before) in the sense that the characters' relationship doesn't develop at a reasonable pace, although I also found the chemistry between them to be believable, in its way. I think there’s a point near the end of the novel when the author offers an interesting glimpse into an alternative “ending” for the fairy tale romance; an ending in which threads are left hanging and marriage, sunsets and babies are not guaranteed. I like that alternative, and it weaves neatly into the way the main character finds herself throughout the story. The other thing that troubles me about this romance is that she falls in love with her teacher. Teacher-pupil relationships are a hard ethical line, and it’s hard to admire anyone who has an affair with their student. There’s a fascinating understory here that the book leaves unresolved. In this book, wizards live for hundreds of years. With the exception of the main character, all the other wizards she meets are 100+ years in age. This age difference sets up an interesting conflict between her values and theirs; and demonstrates how her own values might shift as she learns to, as one of the other wizards tells her, “let go of people.” The romance would have offered a lot more payoff if it had more explicitly explored not just their age gap, but the philosophical differences in their worldviews. What does it mean that she is only 17 and hasn’t buried her children, grand-children and great-grandchildren yet? Did the male character ever have children, and has he outlived them all? How has that shaped him, in a way that goes beyond just a convenient and temporary obstacle to this novel’s romance? This is a big philosophical question that shows like Doctor Who have spent YEARS exploring, and they still haven’t gone into all the nooks and crannies. I think the romance in “Uprooted” either needed more space for its complications or…not to have happened at all. That said, it’s marketed as YA, and I can see it being fun wish fulfillment for the high school girl crushing on her English teacher, or whatever. (Provided it all stays in the fantasy realm)
The magic system, as the reviewer above notes, is not one of the novel’s strong suits. We don’t know why magic works or how, we don’t know what makes the main character a powerful witch, etc. There’s a fun setup in which the very male wizarding establishment is constantly trying to downplay the achievements of the female folk hero Baba Yaga. I liked that conflict, and again felt like it could have used more space.
As you may have guessed by now, this novel is wall-to-wall plot. It moves along briskly, but that means it nods at its complications without necessarily stopping to explore them. I love single-volume fantasies, mainly because we don’t have to hang around thirsting for a sequel when the author gets an HBO series and stops writing for ten years ahem but there are times when this story might feel dense rather than deep.
Where I wanted more:
Finally, finally, the ending. I haven’t spared a lot of time here for plot description (the novel’s been out for four years, you can find a plot summary anywhere) but oh man, this ending. One of the primary complaints I’ve come across in comment sections is that the final chapter, which finally lays bare the mysteries of the haunted Wood, feels a little info-dumpy. MAYBE, MAYBE. But it also introduces an interesting conflict: it turns out the haunted creatures in the Wood are inhabited by the spirits of a people who lived in the valley civilizations before. Their land was taken from them, their queen tricked and imprisoned, their forests chopped down. If you’re thinking whoa, then I’m right there with you. This is a capital-I Idea to introduce at the very end of your story because suddenly, briefly, it’s the original people versus the colonizers. The author is lazy, here, or at least, she misses an opportunity. She draws on the tradition of these sad stories in order to resolve the plot and maybe wring a few tears out of the reader, but she doesn’t give this inter-generational trauma the space or resolution it truly deserves. Yes, the main character is “rooted” to her valley, but these other people were here long before and their roots run far, far deeper. After spinning out a luminous description of the last days of the colonized, the author then pulls back a page later and has the main character tell the Last of the Mohicans “We’re meant to go…we’re not meant to stay forever.” Um, wut? Talk about a too-convenient dismissal, considering the intensity of what she’s just witnessed and the moral validity that the main character’s “rootedness” has received throughout. I left wishing the author had actually done something with these original inhabitants, given them voice and agency, rather than just waving sadly at them from the shores of a future from which they’ve inevitably been erased.
In case it’s not clear by now, “Uprooted” does a lot. It’s complex and dense and delicious and strange. It could easily be a video game, but it could also have been a series of books. Considering how many themes and ideas she introduces, the author does an admirable job pulling it all together. Some of her ideas deserve more space, and I wish she’d given it to them, if only to see what such a talented writer would have done in that space.
