Uprooted

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And Ag-noying (my new name for her) is just so...so...ordinary! At seventeen I was still a too-skinny colt of a girl with big feet and tangled dirt-brown hair, and my only gift, if you could call it that, was I would tear or stain or lose anything put on me between the hours of one day.You don't say! Note should be made of the Dragon’s relationship with Agnieszka. At first, it feels very My Fair Lady, which lots of negative, insulting comments about every aspect of Nieshka’s character. I wasn’t surprised at the growth of emotional connection, and I thought it was handled reasonably organically. Likewise, Nieshka’s growing realization about the long lives of wizards and their growing emotional disconnection made sense. However, I was a little disappointed in how it developed, because it felt like a simple modernization (I’ll spend time on my own without a man! Grow my own life!) of a very old romance trope. The upshot is going to be Nieshka humanizes her calculating, emotionally distant man and will reconnect him to the roots of the world. A five start book might have pushed that conclusion harder.

When I began reading Uprooted, it was pretty tolerable, and you could even go as far as saying that I was " vaguely interested." Unfortunately, after around 10% of the way through, things took a depressing turn, and I asked myself, what the hell was I thinking? The Wood herself becomes a character, fierce and vengeful, creepy and cunning, and so powerful. Magic pours out of this beautiful story about villages and woods, towers and castles, armies and witches, and the more we learn of this world, the more we want to know.But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose. PRAISE FOR UPROOTED hmmmm...you are a tree, you have leaves. You grow branches...You are a tree...grow...grow...You are a tree and have leaves and branches...You are a tree...hmmm I will', Prince Marek said. 'And I'll take this witch-girl of yours, and your lovely peasant [Kasia] too.' Magical and practical, otherworldly and planted in the real, I could NOT stop reading this book and neither will you!" Tamora Pierce

I will say that this book isn't evenly compelling throughout. Most of it was riveting, but there were chapters where I had trouble getting through them, mostly when Agnieszka arrives at a new location and starts bumbling around. I like my female characters to be strong and clever, and while Agnieszka does get there, she sure spends a lot of time being confused and dense at the start. But it's a pretty minor complaint since those were only small parts of the book. It's just so goddamn charming. It's exciting and creepy with regards to the plot and world, but it's made especially wonderful because of the character dynamics. Agnieszka and the Dragon are hilarious together - they operate with a kind of love/hate dynamic that makes for some really funny scenes and some heart-warming ones.Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.” I swear to god I'm the only one in the world who didn't think this book is THE BESTEST MOST SPECIALEST WONDERFULEST BOOK EVER. For god's sake, Emily May loved it, and I highly respect her opinion, but this book is one case where we will have to agree to disagree. Reading Uprooted was like rediscovering a favorite old sweater, familiar and beloved. It feels as if it has always existed and has been waiting patiently for me to return to it.” —Maggie Stiefvater Ok so to start with this book took me months to read...MONTHS I tell you. Actually looking at the dates on Goodreads it was close to a year but I did start and stop a lot so... I can normally devour a fantasy book twice this size in half the time . I just wasn’t interested.

If you like Fantasy that really lays out the groundwork for their worldbuilding, with detailed descriptions about people groups and places then you will love uprooted.

Uprooted

Hest is a young guy, a teenager that lives in a simple part of the realm. He has never seen trees and there is no much light. After his parents passed away the inn keeper took him in. He is a stable boy who loves to take care of the horses. One day when a mysterious man comes by the inn and seen talking to and then paying the inn keeper. The next thing Hest knows he is being told to get his stuff and that he is going to be leaving with the man. He thinks that he has been sold as a slave but he will soon find out that his new position is so much more. With no idea what will happen next Hest leaves behind his life to begin a new one in a part of the realm that he has only heard stories about. Uprooted is beautifully written, with an unusual setting and a great set of characters, realistic and flawed but admirable. There's a wonderful, touching, layered relationship between Nieszka and her friend, Kasia. It explores good and evil, love for friends, family and nation, and other complex themes in a nuanced way. One of my favorite fantasy reads this year. Finally, I want to say how much I appreciate this thoughtful and honest approach to Idaho's people and culture. After reading Educated earlier this year I have found myself annoyed that for so many people it has become their default when they think about my home state. I can't wait to recommend this as an alternative to every single person who asks me about Educated.

There are many aspects of the book that demand deeper examination, but I’m going to focus on the three things that sang to me the most: the rules of magic in Agnieszka’s world (and related to that, overall worldbuilding and deep-rooted corruption at the heart of the Wood), the subversive thematic elements (especially concerning female characters and traditional notions of heroism), and the powerful relationships that define each of these characters.Once in the Wood, they face the monsters that have been created by the Wood-Queen, a woman who was a member of the people who lived in the land long before Agnieszka's people and who had manifested herself in Queen Hannah's body. They clashed with Agnieszka's people and most chose to become trees in the Wood. But the Wood-Queen, who had been treated horribly in life, allowed anger to consume her to the point that she had corrupted everything in the Wood. Agnieszka and Sarkan initially try to destroy her, but Agnieszka comes to realize that she needs to help her make the transition to a tree state, and to understand that nothing is meant to last forever – including the trees. The fact that many gushed over The Dragon disturbed me. This dude is abusive. ABUSE IS NOT ROMANTIC. Verbal or physical otherwise. STOP THIS SHIT, AUTHORS. Place yourself in Agnieszka's shoes. Put more imaginations on how YOU would feel if you were being treated like all those ways I pointed out. He called her intolerable and crazy in one sentence and then he kissed her. This is only the first kiss. So. Yeah. Already prejudiced against the Strangle-Trees ( or whatever they're called) in this story. No one went into the Wood and came out again, at least not whole and themselves. Sometimes they came out blind and screaming, sometimes they came out twisted and so misshapen they couldn’t be recognized; and worst of all sometimes they came out with their own faces but murder behind them, something gone dreadfully wrong within.