Powerful fantasy woven with words
CALLING Naomi Novik’s Uprooted a riff on Beauty And The Beast doesn’t begin to describe the richness, depth, and sheer pleasure of this fantasy.
As heroine Agnieszka learns, and as Novik demonstrates over and over in this story, powerful magic flows from a combination of heart and getting the details right.
Once a decade in a rural valley, a wizard known as the Dragon picks one of the village’s 17- yearold girls, who returns with him to his tower for the next 10 years. The girls never come back to the valley.
The villagers tolerate this because the Dragon protects them from the evil of an encroaching Wood that is filled with monsters and horrors.
Everyone assumes the wizard will choose her beautiful, graceful friend Kasia, but to the surprise of all he plucks our narrator Agnieszka, the kind of girl who wears her brother’s castoffs and forages in the forest all day.
She eventually learns that Sarkan, the seemingly cold Dragon, doesn’t take these girls to abuse them – he needs the magic he senses in them to fight the Wood.
She stumbles awkwardly and often tearfully through a Pygmalion- ish apprenticeship, until working wholeheartedly with Sarkan on a spell unlocks something powerful in her:
“On an impulse I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the waterwheel of a mill, and mine the rushing stream driving it around.
“‘ What are you –’ he began, and then abruptly we had only a single rose, and it began to grow. ... He was staring at the riot of flowers all around us, as astonished as I was.”
Recognising her gift for a healing form of magic, the wizard still struggles with it, and with Agnieszka.
Sarkan treats magic like a research scientist, classifying and codifying. Her natural bent is more related and personal. ( Armchair Jungians, start your engines.)
Like the kingdom’s other wizards, Sarkan, despite his ageless looks, has lived so long that he has little emotional connection to individual humans, even though he devotes his life to protecting them in the aggregate. He is ready to write Kasia off after the Wood engulfs her, but Agnieszka isn’t.
A daring, draining rescue attempt raises the stakes for everyone, and drags wizard and apprentice into court intrigues and an ongoing conflict between the kingdoms of Polnya and Rosya. ( Novik draws deeply on Slavic folklore in this novel, including a hearty nod to the Baba Yaga tradition.)
Sarkan sagely predicts that the Wood, now aware of Agnieszka’s power, will strike back hard.
Some readers have likened Agnieszka to Katniss from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games ( though the lovely, sword- wielding Kasia is more Katniss- like). The Uprooted heroine reminds me occasionally of Meg Murry from A Wrinkle In Time and other Madeleine L’Engle novels, an awkward girl whose secret weapon in the fight against evil is the power of her love – in Agnieszka’s case, her love for her friend Kasia, for her rural village, for uncorrupted Nature and, eventually, for Sarkan.
Uprooted is not billed as a young adult ( YA) novel, but some YA specialists have been recommending it to teens, and I agree with them.
Agnieska’s coming- of- age story should appeal to teen readers; its vividly imagined world should please anyone who loves a good story; its deep consideration of how to face evil will give readers plenty to ponder after the book is closed. – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/ Tribune News Service
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by nathan Filer Weekly list compiled by MPH Bookstores, Mid Valley Megamall, Kuala Lumpur; www. mphonline. com