Review: Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Uprooted by Naomi Novik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Agnieszka is from a small town that is 7 miles from the Wood - full of walkers and beasts who every once in awhile take children or adults who get too close to the edge of the Wood. But Agnieszka still loves the life of her village. She loves her family and her friends and the life she has.

But the time has come for the Dragon, the wizard, to collect the next girl who will live with him for 10 years. No one knows what happens. Just that when the 10 years are up, the girls are released and they move on in society. They seem to be almost too good for their little village now, and take their hefty dowry they receive and move on from their life before.

The Dragon only picks one girl who is of age 16-17 every 10 years. It just so happens that Agnieszka falls in that group. But so does her best friend Kasia, and everyone knows that Kasia is going to be picked. She is the most beautiful, the most poised, and her mother has been training her on how to survive the next 10 years in the town with the wizard. Kasia is ready when the Dragon comes, and is excited to leave the village to journey on her next adventure.

So when the Dragon is there and going through all of the right aged girls, it seems like a sure bet he is going to pick her. Except he doesn't. The Dragon picks Agnieszka, even though it seems like he doesn't want to. No one was ready for this, and Agnieszka doesn't even get to say goodbye to everyone she loves. The Dragon just whisks her away quickly, and with his magic they are in the tower within seconds.

Agnieszka doesn't know what to do. She doesn't know how to mend, how to cook, how to clean. She wasn't trained for this because they all thought that Kasia was going to be picked. So now she is blundering her way through things.

But she comes to find out that she was picked because she has magic inside of her, and as by law, the Dragon must train her to use this ability. Agnieszka thinks he's losing it, because she couldn't possibly have any magic. But the more she trains with him, the more she realizes that he may be right. But it is not the same kind of magic that the Dragon does, which makes training very hard and frustrating.

Before they can get too far in the training, there are riots and commotions of dangerous, rare monsters attacking the small villages next to the Wood. When the Dragon is out to fix this, another issue happens in Agnieszka's village, and she rushes to save them with the little magic she has been trained.

After confronting the Wood and finding out dark and dangerous things about the Wood, Agnieszka realizes that she has started an all out war between the kingdom and the Wood. And now there might not be any survivors after everything is said and done.

But Agnieszka is determined to win. Otherwise, everyone she loves and knows will be destroyed by the ancient evil that lives in the Wood, and the deep retribution they are in to condemn everyone around them.

Most wizards and witches don't get deep in their magic until at least 7 years of training, but Agnieszka is going to have to try with just a few months worth of training, with the Dragon's help.

My co-worker read this and loved it, so I wanted to read it and see what it was all about. And I'm glad I did because it was a really good book! I loved the world that Naomi Novik created and how twisted it became the more and more you read on.

Agnieszka is my favorite character. She is such a mess and is always getting dirty by one thing or another. And she doesn't give a hoot and a half. She knows she is messy, but she does what she wants and doesn't care if she messes up a dress. Or sure, she tries to keep it clean, but after 16 years she's come to expect nothing less.

So for her to start off as that kind of character who is shy and always in the background being invisible to the badass who marches into the kingdom yelling at the king to get what she needs done in order to protect the whole world from the Wood? Year, she's amazing. She doesn't even realize her power - she just wants to figure out the problem and help fix it before it is too late. And she doesn't let the wizards of hundreds of years intimidate her, but just tells them how it is and watch them while they figure out that she is right.

And she was such a brave girl for going with the Dragon when no one saw it coming. Sure, she was upset and scared, but she didn't let that stop her from what was expected of her and to find out what she had to do for the next 10 years.

But she is a wicked witch and I loved the scenes where she is pushing herself to the max to save the people around her in the Wood. There is so much power in her and she doesn't even know the half of it.

This is a very action packed novel and I was never bored through any of it. Sometimes I thought that there was a bit much and that the characters needed to rest, but Novik kept pushing them on and on to the point where I thought they would keep over with exhaustion. But that just shows how strong these characters are inside and outside.

There is so much that happens in this novel and i was very pleased with how everything ended. I'm glad that I ended up checking this book out after my co-worker talked about it, and now I have someone I can talk details with about it! :D

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