Uprooted

I picked up Uprooted on a wet weekend because a bookseller told me it reads like a fairy tale told by someone who grew up hearing the old versions, not the cleaned up ones. I knew Naomi Novik from the Temeraire books about dragons in the Napoleonic wars, and I was curious what she would do with a single wizard in a tower. My Del Rey paperback runs 448 pages and the 2015 first edition won the Nebula for best novel the next year, which made me expect something polished. What I got was messier and better, a story about a valley in a Poland-like country, a cold wizard called the Dragon, and a plain girl with dirty hands who turns out to be exactly the wrong choice and exactly the right one.

A valley that pays every ten years

The valley of Dvernik lies at the edge of a large Wood that is far more than trees. Villages string along a river, each with its field and mill, all owing service to a king far off in Krakow-like Rosya. Every ten years the wizard Sarkan, whom locals call the Dragon, comes down from his tower and takes a girl of seventeen back with him for ten years. No one says slave, but no one says guest either. Families dress their daughters well and teach them to sing and sew, hoping to be chosen or hoping not to be chosen, since no one knows what happens in the tower. The girls who return come back changed and quiet, and they never speak of it.

Our narrator is Agnieszka, daughter of a woodcutter, with tangled hair, stained skirts, and a habit of fixing things in the wrong order. Her best friend is Kasia, the miller's daughter, who is everything Agnieszka is not. Kasia is neat and brave, loved by all, skilled with a bow and with accounts, and clearly the perfect pick for the Dragon. Both girls dread the choosing year. Agnieszka spends it hiding behind Kasia in every sense, convinced Sarkan will take her friend and leave her to marry some local boy and tend goats. When Sarkan arrives in his dark coat, cold faced and barely looking at the crowd, he points past Kasia straight at Agnieszka. The whole valley gasps, Kasia cries out, and Agnieszka feels sick with shame and relief tangled together.

I loved this opening because it flips the usual chosen one beat. Agnieszka is not secretly beautiful or secretly royal. She is clumsy in a way that feels lived in. She loses ribbons, burns soup, leaves tools out in rain. Novik makes you believe the Dragon has made a clerical error, and then slowly shows you what he sensed and the valley missed. Her mess is not cute quirk, it is how her power moves, sideways and sprouting.

The tower and the wrong girl

The tower stands in a clearing near the Wood, tall and narrow, full of stairs that shift and rooms that clean themselves. Sarkan is centuries old, kept young by magic, sharp tongued and impatient, used to girls who weep or flatter. He tries to teach Agnieszka in his style, with Latin-like spells, precise gestures, table work. She fails at all of it. She cannot pronounce the old tongue, cannot sit still, sets a sleeve on fire. He calls her stupid to her face and leaves her to copy texts. She cries in the kitchen and befriends Solya, or rather finds no servants at all, only enchanted brooms and pots, and a library that smells of dust and lemon.

The turn comes when Agnieszka stops trying to copy him. Left alone while Sarkan fights the Wood, she hums a village song while mending a torn spell and the magic answers. Where Sarkan commands, she coaxes. Where he builds walls of force, she braids living things together. She learns she can do workings with song and touch that he cannot, though they exhaust her and leave her shaking. Sarkan watches one such mending with narrowed eyes and starts, grudgingly, to adjust. He gives her a workroom. He lets her gather herbs. He admits, in as few words as possible, that her gift runs wild like the Wood itself, only turned toward growth.

Their lessons become the heart of the middle book. He shows her how to draw power from shadow and stone. She shows him how to listen for the song under a spell. They cleanse a corrupted cow together, argue over pronunciation, share bread at midnight. Kasia writes letters that reach Agnieszka rarely, full of village news and worry. Agnieszka writes back with ink that smudges. I found these chapters warm despite the cold tower, because Novik lets competence grow slowly. Agnieszka still ruins a cloak, still misreads a rune, but each failure teaches her limits. Power here has a cost in nosebleeds and blistered hands, which kept me believing in it.

The Wood that walks

The Wood is the true villain, and Novik writes it with patience. It is not evil in a cackling way. It is a vast corrupted mind, centered on a heart tree where a long dead queen lingers, spreading rot through roots and spores and water. Animals near it grow wrong. Men who walk in too far come out hollow, called Walkers, with bark under skin and sap for blood, repeating last tasks. Trees move when unwatched. Paths close. A river village called Porosna is half swallowed in one chilling sequence, with houses leaning and people singing in sleep.

Sarkan has held the Wood back for a century with fire and wards, but he is losing. He burns corridors, sets guards of stone, and still the corruption seeps around him. Agnieszka sees early that burning alone will not win. Fire clears, yet the soil stays sick. Her gift lets her reach into rot and pull out living pattern, though it risks pulling her in too. One of the best scenes has her entering a corrupted man to find the girl he was, singing through layers of bark to draw him back for a minute. It fails to save him and still matters, because it proves the Wood can be spoken to.

Kasia becomes the cost made flesh. Lured into the Wood while gathering herbs for her mother, she is taken and planted, half turned into a tree bride with leaves in her hair. Sarkan wants to write her off as lost. Agnieszka refuses, drags her bloody friend from the earth, and spends days pouring her own strength into cleansing. She saves Kasia's life but cannot get all the Wood out. Kasia returns with strange speed, strange sight, able to hear trees. I ached during those pages. The friendship never turns catty, which is rare in books about two girls and one wizard. Kasia loves Agnieszka without envy, and Agnieszka loves Kasia without using her as a mirror.

Alosha appears in this stretch and I was glad for her. She is an older swordswoman from a burned village, scarred and blunt, who hunts Walkers with axe and fire. She teaches Agnieszka how to move in the Wood, where to step, when to run. Her lessons are practical and grim. Cut here. Burn that. Do not touch the fruit. Alosha has no magic, only memory of everyone she failed to save, and she lends the book steel when spells grow soft.

Princes, courts and old songs

Word of trouble reaches the king, and Sarkan is summoned to court with Agnieszka as his unlikely aide. The capital is all marble and gossip, wizards in colored robes, ladies with painted eyes, and a young Prince Marek who is handsome in the way that means trouble. Marek believes the Wood killed his mother, Queen Hanna, twenty years back, and he wants revenge with swords and fire. He despises Sarkan for caution and mocks Agnieszka for muddy boots. His pride sets the next disaster in motion, when he leads a party into the Wood to prove strength and must be rescued at high cost.

Court also brings Baba Jaga into the tale, not as a person but as lore. Village tales speak of Jaga, the first witch who learned from the Wood and left songs and warnings. Agnieszka finds her story in fragments, in a grimoire written in a woman's hand, in rhymes children sing while shelling peas. Jaga loved a Wood queen's daughter, or was betrayed by a king, depending on who sings. The songs contradict each other, which felt honest to me. Novik uses this lore to widen the past without stopping plot cold, though at times she pauses a chase to explain three generations of queens. I skimmed one such passage on first read and caught it on second, which tells you both the richness and the drag.

The court scenes work best when they stay social. Agnieszka, in a borrowed gown, spills wine and then out-talks a circle of court wizards by describing how a spell feels in her teeth. Sarkan, bored and brilliant, insults a rival named the Falcon with precise courtesy. Kasia, brought as proof of Wood taint, stands calm while ladies stare. These moments show class without lecturing. Country knowledge counts here. A midwife's trick for turning a breech calf helps untangle a knotted ward. A harvest song steadies a shaking tower. Novik keeps saying, in action rather than speech, that peasant memory is an archive too.

How their magic fits together

By the last third, Sarkan and Agnieszka stop being teacher and failed pupil and become something rarer, two mages with opposite methods who can braid workings. He provides structure, dates, wards, force. She provides life, song, growth, welcome. Together they attempt what no wizard has tried in a hundred years, to enter the heart tree and face the queen rather than burn around her.

The finale moves fast and strange. They walk into the Wood with Alosha and Kasia and Marek trailing, each carrying their own wound. Walkers rise from leaf mold. Rivers run backward. The heart tree opens like a mouth. Inside, Agnieszka finds not a monster but a grieving remnant, a queen who loved her people and was poisoned by tower wizards long ago, whose pain grew into hunger. Sarkan wants to strike. Agnieszka wants to cleanse. Their argument, held while branches pierce their arms, is the moral core. Killing the heart might kill the Wood and also kill every tainted person tied to it, including Kasia. Healing it might free them all or swallow the healers.

Novik resolves this with a working that is both spell and story. Agnieszka sings the valley into the Wood, names of villages and rivers and grandmothers, while Sarkan holds the channel open with all his centuries of discipline. Kasia anchors them from outside, half Wood herself, refusing to let go. Alosha guards their bodies with axe. Marek, humbled, carries fire but does not light it until asked. The queen remembers being loved, the rot loosens, Walkers fall like empty husks, and the Wood, though still vast and strange, stops hungering. Sarkan nearly dies holding the frame. Agnieszka nearly dissolves into song. They wake muddy and bleeding and alive.

I found the closing chapters satisfying because they pay off small details. A jam recipe from chapter two becomes a cleansing base. A joke about Sarkan's terrible cooking becomes a scene of care. The tower, once cold, grows a garden on its roof. Agnieszka chooses to stay part of the year and walk the valley the rest, teaching village girls songs that are also spells. It is not a throne ending. It is a work ending, which suits her.

Where the spell wobbles

For all my affection, parts of the book sag. The romance between Agnieszka and Sarkan arrives fast for two people who start with contempt. He insults her, grabs her wrist, locks her in rooms, and then within fifty pages they are sharing baths and tender looks. Novik tries to bridge this with magical link and forced closeness, and some readers will accept that heat grows in danger. I did not fully buy it. Sarkan's shift from bully teacher to lover needed one more scene of plain apology, rather than improved manners after she proves useful. Their bond works best as partnership. As love story it feels rushed.

Kasia also deserves more than the plot gives her. She begins as vivid as Agnieszka, then spends much of the middle as a victim to be saved, a body in earth, a patient in bed. Her Wood touched strength later is thrilling, she outruns wolves and reads trails, yet she rarely drives choice. The story uses her pain to spur Agnieszka, a pattern some call fridging, where a friend suffers so the hero can grow. Novik clearly loves Kasia and gives her a fine late role at court and in the finale, but I still closed the book wishing Kasia had gotten her own chapter of choosing.

The lore dumps slow the middle too. Baba Jaga tales, lists of kings, explanations of how summoning works, all arrive in thick paragraphs right when Walkers approach. I understand the need. A invented magic system needs rules. Yet three pages on the history of the tower while Alosha shouts to run broke tension for me twice. A slimmer hand, or songs spaced earlier, would have helped. Readers who love thick history may not mind. Readers who came for Kasia and Agnieszka may fidget.

None of this spoiled the whole. The valley feels damp and real, the Wood feels truly other, and Agnieszka's voice, funny and harried and stubborn, carries pages that would stall in other hands. If you like fairy tale retellings with mud on boots, or wizards who must learn from farm girls, or friendships that survive magic without turning sour, this 448 page Del Rey novel earns its Nebula. I finished it late, lights low, and went to check my own garden for strange shoots the next morning.