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.