This was a phenomenal read! All the stars for this one!

Uprooted follows Agnieszka, a girl living in a village on the edge of a magically corrupt Wood. Every ten years, the Dragon, a wizard who lives in a tower on the edge of the Wood, takes one girl from the villages along the Wood to live with him in his tower. When the girls come back after the ten years they stay for a week, and then leave forever. Agnieszka is certain it won't be her, she is nothing special, unlike her best friend Kasia. But when the Dragon comes along to look at the eligible girls, it is to everyone's surprise that he chooses not Kasia, but Agnieszka. Now she must uproot herself from everything she has known to spend the next ten years with the Dragon, but she will find more there than she had bargained for.

***From this point on, there will be spoilers. I tried to keep my little synopsis to what the back of the book says, so from here on you'll learn things that aren't part of that.***

Naomi Novik's writing is extremely easy to read and get pulled into the story. The short synopsis only provided a very small idea of what the story had in store. Agnieszka is a relate-able character. She doesn't seem to have anything particularly special about her, in fact she's rather clumsy and doesn't really care much about her appearance. She is also very stubborn, which is a trait seen in some female MCs, but her type of stubborn was kind of funny. In a way it felt slightly petty, but in a way that anyone can really relate to. I liked that she had her own way of doing magic too that infuriated the Dragon because it kind of capitalized on her stubborn personality. I also loved the way that her magic was explained, like she was finding her way through a forest. It was kind of a foreshadowing for what else was to come.

I loved how much happened in this story and how unpredictable it was. I had a very few ideas of what might happen next, and all of them were wrong. This is something that I really enjoy in books because a lot of stories are predictable in what will happen at the end. The ever present worry about the Wood is continually talked about but no one knows how it can be held back or, better yet, stopped for good. I thought there would be some sort of revelation on how to stop the Wood way before there was, and I liked that the obvious out of Alosha's sword wasn't what the answer ended up being. During all the fighting at the end and Agnieszka kept trying to figure out ways to use magic, I kept screaming in my head for them to use the sword. But when Kasia did finally use it, it didn't work. This to me was really well done and left even more mystery to the story. The pacing was great and kept me engaged, and made me want to drag out the story because I didn't want it to end.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who is looking for an adult fantasy story that doesn't have an overwhelming amount of description or amount of characters that draws you in immediately and is written well. The magic in it is very interesting and different, and the story is unlike anything else I have ever read. I first got Beauty and the Beast vibes, where the "Beauty" wasn't such a beauty but the beast was beastly. But it quickly transformed into something all its own, and had an unexpected ending that I never could have imagined.