I wish to start out by saying that I slowly fell in love with this setting - with the atmospheres and tones it developed, the magic system, the forest-based eldritch horror, and the mysterious fantasy adventure that ensued for two-thirds of the book. If there were any more written in this world - not even a direct sequel, just stories happening to take place in the same setting - I'd definitely pick them up.

However, there were glaring flaws with this specific story - especially towards the beginning - that nearly had me DNFing had I not persisted until the plot got juicy. The romance is the main source of it, it just did not work at all. The love interest is so unlikable from the start and the "redemption" so sudden and unbuilt that I never truly got to like him even by the final page, and therefore just could not believe the romance. He starts off with such bad anger issues - even when things are going well, he has a fit about that, and I felt even more soured on him. He's MIA for a good chunk of the middle, which unfortunately means there's hardly any convincing development for his character and the relationships; the author still tried to have hints of it on the heroine's side, but it just felt forced, and I believe the very sudden rush of "progress" in the romance right before this gap of his appearances was meant to compensate for his incoming absence, but that also just felt forced and completely unbelievable. The heroine has more chemistry with her best friend Kasia than she does with the Dragon - I think she actually kissed Kasia more times than the Dragon! Their relationship was a lot stronger and Kasia was even with her for most of the important plot in the middle of the story, with the relationship being the catalyst for many developments in the adventure, so why wasn't this story about them being sapphic??

As much as I love the story of the latter two-thirds of the book, the first few chapters are so painful to get through. The overall story feels like two different books: that the author set out to write a Beauty and the Beast retelling, but it suddenly became usurped by a more intriguing fantasy mystery-adventure with eldritch horror and sapphic love, and had to awkwardly shoehorn in the actual het "love makes you a better person" romance at the end.

Something else I noticed as I read, which I don't actually have an issue with at all: it feels like this was at least loosely inspired by Howl's Moving Castle? I don't think it's because of a possible overlap in the mythological sources, since this story is heavily Polish while I believe Howl is Welsh. I started to suspect it as

the heroine realized she was secretly a witch the whole time and the Dragon had known the whole time, too.

Maybe I'm reaching and all just coincidental, but I could imagine various details being spun from Howl, made very different in this plot but the sentiment of them still present if you're familiar enough:

the intimidating wizard in a part of the land no one steps foot in (with similar-ish names for said lands), the "dragon" in the wizard's name, the very beautiful and perfect girl from the heroine's life that she compares her plain self to, the order for all magic-users to be trained and serve the crown, the war between two kingdoms due to missing royalty

. It was around the point of the detail of stuck-up rich people riding in boxes with chairs inside that I really started to suspect that either this was a fanfic of Howl turned original, or the author was just really influenced while making this story. Again, I don't actually take issue with it, and I don't think it's something like plagiarism. I just thought it was a very interesting detail, and potentially a draw for anyone into Howl's Moving Castle.

One more odd detail that kinda turned me off every time it got brought up was how dirty the heroine gets and how much attention is drawn to it each time. The amount of times it happened and how much detail gave me "the author's fetish" vibes in the scale of discomfort.

Uprooted comes alive on the page, the magic seeming to come alive on my fingers where they touch the page, alive. Novik's ability to translate the ephemeral into tangible - Agnieszka's magic likened to gleaning the forest for berries, and Sarkan's to academia  - is unparalleled. I almost believed I could cast a spell myself after looking up from the pages.

So, too, do Novik's characters come alive, leaping with life. It's hard to not love Agnieszka's scrappy defiance, Sarkan's dry wit, Kasia's unwavering devotion. 

This book begins by recounting a tale of the Dragon taking a girl from the valley into his tower every ten years, but Uprooted is not so simple. The story starts with the Dragon, but then winds itself through the valley, the whole of Polnya, into the Wood; then folds back on itself, layering life and violence and beauty and corruption into an intricate web. Just when you think the story is getting good, just when you think there's going to be the climax, there's still dozens to hundreds of pages left, leaving you thinking, What could possibly happen next? And then you peel back layer after layer, finally settling down onto the mossy forest floor, looking at the sun dappling through the leaves, boughs heavy with fruit.

There's a reason this book isn't a 5.0 for me, though: the love interest. I'll spoiler tag it, but it's really not that much of a spoiler:

Agnieszka and Sarkan.

The story goes that

the Dragon kidnaps a girl from the valley and locks her up in his tower

. How am I supposed to jive with that? That's not even mentioning that fact that he is 8 times her age. When they meet, she is seventeen goddamn years old, and he is at least 150. How do I know that? It's brought up more than once.

When they finally sleep together, he even protests, saying that he's way too old.

Honestly, that makes it even worse, like he's absolved of all blame just because he mentions the one-hundred-year age gap, but goes along with it anyway. Even though I love them both as characters, and by the end I was aching to see them together, it doesn't sit right with me to read the really old guy falling in love with the mature-for-her-age child. (Besides,

Kasia

was the obvious choice for

Agnieszka

, anyway. Why are we so afraid of putting gay people in our fantasy?)

That said, this is a truly beautiful book, and I enjoyed it very much.

It reminded me of an adult version of Hannah Whitten’s “For the Wolf,” but I did find that book more enjoyable. 

It’s clear Nokik is a talented writer, her descriptions are lovely and evocative. However, I was uncomfortable with the attempted sexual assault near the beginning of the book and couldn’t really move past that since it was unnecessary to the plot. 

Her characters were well written but were boring and took their sweet time to do anything.