It has everything I wanted to read for the past few months– fairytale elements, evil cop-killing crop-poisoning forest, real dirty grungy heroines, homoerotic bestfriendship between two women that isn't fraught due to another guy, mothers both young and old, wizards in towers, wizards who fuck, wizards who don't fuck but do fuck around, wizards who found out, princes who are stupidly arrogant

and dead

, princes who are noble

and dead

, multiple nuanced queens, magic rivers that end nowhere, baba yaga's footnotes, rotten fruit you can't help but eat,

extra large praying mantises

, the first forays into video calling technology, the indescribable power of people never leaving their homes despite danger and the threat to life, and

rehabilitation after great environmental disasters.

10/10 would recommend and read other of Naomi Novik's works honestly

I'm conflicted on this one, because on the one hand, it was really easy and fun to read, but I do think it has some serious flaws. Despite not being advertized as YA, it definitely felt like it. It had several irritating YA traits-- young protag who is "different than other girls and definitely not pretty", the girls all get chosen at 17 (why is it always 17?), the love interested is introduced within a sustained power dynamic that's supposed to be attractive. 

I thought it had some really good ideas, the forest fascinated me, I think the magic system and the forest were my favourite parts. And it truly was effective in roping me in, otherwise I would have quit reading. I liked Agnieszka's decriptions of magic, especially how she had a special way to access it, which was different from the rigid magic structures most others used. The spell descriptions were lovely too. 

I think there was too much war, after a while of people getting killed off, you stop being emotionally connected, and it completely loses impact. The point trying to be made through the war was already established for me, it didn't need to continue for so long. That leads me directly to my next point: the resolution wasn't given enough time. I kept waiting for the ending I knew was coming, and it only happened in the last couple chapters, where a whole bunch of information was dumped and all the loose ends tied up.

I knew the forest wasn't evil at heart, and it's true, the forest queen's people were hunted by the humans, and then they buried her alive unable to die-- who can blame her for wanting to exact revenge? But the book goes on and on about how evil the forest is, and then it all switches in a couple chapters to "oh, we have to live in harmony now" and Agnieszka  is healing the forest.

I don't think either side of the story got the resolution they deserved. I also found the resolution to the romance unsatisfying.

On one page she's saying how he left to the city and never wrote to her, and it's ok, she's made her peace, but then on the very last page he reappears, and everything is happy go lucky. The last line is literally "come meet my mother".

Main plot was dull and unengaging. Romance was also dull as well as really toxic and gross. 17 year old mentee who has basically been kidnapped by hundreds of years old emotionally abusive, cold wizard mentor who basically kidnapped her. And you're telling me they're falling in love?? No, ew! Also, he's boring.

This is genuinely my new favorite book; no exaggeration. If I did things like give more than five stars, I would. I loved literally everything about Uprooted. The way magic worked (and didn't), the characters and how they grew, the spice (subjective, but I'd say just mild), and tension. Not a word was wasted. Nothing was left undone or dragged on too long. Immaculate pacing. I aspire to write a book this good.

This book does a good job of subverting classic Western fairytale tropes, while bringing older and lesser-known fairytale elements to a new audience. It has a good balance of plot elements, and doesn't let its sub-plots shove their way into the spotlight when the main plot is what needs to move forward. Its protagonists are smart but can't see the big picture until near the end, and its antagonists see the whole chess board but lose their grip on the little things that keep a game going. It's a compelling opposition, and it makes the reader consider the value of both large and small scale aspects of life and mortality. Some characters and plot elements that felt unresolved even when the text explicitly specified what happened to them, but otherwise this is a very good book well worth reading. 

This was a really charming fairytale-like story. I felt the way the prose swept you along was really fantastic, lots of pretty metaphors. I found the plot mostly enjoyable, the ending with the wood queen was probably the weakest element to me, just the kind of overdone ending I've seen before. Also a lot of the other important magic scenes where very character driven so I was disappointed that one wasn't.  I really enjoyed Agnieszka's relationship with Kasia and Sarkan. Kudos to the audiobook for having the narrator be actually eastern European with a true accent, I've listened to some bad accents in books but here it felt it added to the immersion 

As someone who grew up reading endless variations of fairy tales and folk tales, I absolutely love Uprooted as a new addition to an old genre. 

Novik crafts a story that feels right at home with other fairy tales: a farm girl, a wizard who lives in a tower, a malevolent forest. As a result, it includes fairy tale trappings that can disorient a modern reader: magical items that suddenly appear, a main character working off of instinct rather than strategy. It's also a story that doesn't shy away from the ugly bits that don't make it into songs, like the deaths of foot soldiers whose names you'll never learn. 

Particularly memorable: 
- The descriptions of the many awful ways the Wood twists its victims 
- Kasia and Agnieszka recognizing and working through the complicated feelings regarding who is chosen
- Agnieszka

figuring out that the Dragon is all bark, no bite

and then

doing whatever she wants

My third book by Novik! To be blunt, while I did enjoy this one, I prefer Spinning Silver. There were a couple things that felt off to me and stopped me from enjoying it as much as I thought I was going to. Part of it was the pacing towards the second half of the book. I thought it felt a little rushed, especially after Agnieszka

and Kasia escaped back to the tower with the children

, and that the ending was a little weird/abrupt, too.

The characters were fine - for me they fell a bit flat and weren’t particularly loveable or relatable. I also couldn’t get behind the romance - since there were so few scenes and so little development, it felt as though they would have made more sense as unlikely friends (and that it wouldn’t have affected the story all that much). I’m all for lowkey, second-to-the-plot romances - in fact, I usually prefer them - this one just didn’t work for me.

I should stress that while it wasn’t my favourite, and though I’ve gone into more depth about the things I disliked than the things I liked, there were lots of things I enjoyed about this book, including: 
- The overall writing/story/plot, which was on par with Novik’s usual standards - well written, thought-provoking, and creative. 
- The magic system was interesting, and I really liked the descriptions of it.
- Agnieszka’s friendship with Kasia. It’s always nice to read about a friendship that’s so obviously full of love and trust.

Overall, I’m glad I read this book, and recommend just giving it a try if you’re on the fence about it.

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.