Uprooted by Naomi Novik
Rating: ★★★★★
Yes yes yes. This book is a must read!
It's very rare to find a new, really well done fairy tale, but here, I declare, is a treasure. The story is original, but even still is packed with emotions and themes that are half-familiar to childhood. Magic and mountains set the frame of a young girl's life in a town near "The Wood." A lone tower looks on above their town, containing a man who is both a Dragon and a wizard. Genuine characters deal with the mysterious realities of their world.
Agnieszka is a klutz who, to everyone's incredible surprise, is chosen by the Dragon to come live in his tower for the next ten years. I say intense surprise because the Dragon takes only the best/most-special girls, and that is Agnieszka's best friend to a T—a girl as beautiful as the sun is bright, as kind as any saint, and as talented as any Mr. Darcy approved regency woman. Agnieszka deals with this shock like a champ. It's really hilarious and wonderful to see. She's a breathing character—it's only truly great authors who can bring you into their world and plop you down on a grassy knoll to observe, and ache, and laugh with their characters (though you mostly laugh affectionately AT Agnieszka).
Soon The Wood, the malevolent magical forest that surrounds Agnieszka's life, begins encroaching and attacking towns in the valley, and the rest of the novel deals with this intruding power, and the people who are compelled to fight it.
The Wood itself was one of my favorite characters to ponder, with all that it represented—our inner demons, our tendencies towards self-pity and self destruction, feelings of lost isolation, what can happen if you lose yourself in negative emotions and bitterness. It is these evils that Agnieszka faces more than any magic. At the heart of it all, she is really facing brokenness, and facing it quite courageously. She grows from this simple girl, jealous and hurting for her best friend, to a triumphant warrior defending her home and the people she loves—nursing her valley to health and light.
Here is a tale with themes of strength, growth, and life in the face of fear and destruction, beautifully enacted through an average girl with tremendous heart.