Reviews with content warning for Child death - Uprooted

I found the plot to move in leaps and starts, not unmanageable but noticeable. There were times I felt important parts of conversations weren’t had, and I would’ve loved some breathing room to understand the depth of the relationships better, especially the one between Agniezka and the dragon. With Kasia it was established they had years before the book to be childhood friends, but I would have liked to see the development more.

I thought that the ending and the allegory was sweet and hopeful. Considering how dark things got to lead to that point, it felt like a gentle ending that was earned. It made sense and I was satisfied knowing how things got to where they did. I liked how many of the relationships were hard to interpret. There were a lot of conflicting interests and I enjoyed not knowing. The shallow nature of the court proceedings opposed to the people just trying to get by. Overall enjoyed this a lot.

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rokinjaguar's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Hmm, okay. VERY good book. It's incredibly descriptive and vivid. I could see it all in my mind. I kept reacting externally to things that would happen, shuddering at horrifying moments, jumping when the Dragon would pop up out of nowhere, feeling real dread and fear, heart glowing at sweet moments, saying "get rekt" under my breath when Agnieszka roasts someone, etc. I really burned through this book.
There are a lot of amazing female characters, like Kasia and a powerful and wise witch later in the story. I also really love Agnieszka, she was a lot of fun to read about. Loved how intuitive, emotional, and in tune with nature she was. Like seriously, she really spoke to my heart. I'm sure she won't connect with everyone like she did me, but the starved emotional/creative part of my soul adored her. The male characters were good, too, I really enjoyed the Dragon, but the female characters are where the writing really shines imo. Side note,

Malek and the Falcon can choke and die, and I mean that in a my-compliments-to-the-author way

.
I think the book would have been better if the author had taken out the

attempted-rape scene with the shitty prince and the sex scene

The kissing scene

could stay or go, it adds and subtracts to the story pretty equally. But I feel like the

attempted-rape scene

wasn’t handled quite sensitively enough. Didn’t bother me, but it was borderline, and I have a little thread of upsetness in me that

the Dragon never really comforted or reassured her or was angry for her over that – it's an incredibly traumatizing thing to experience

. The Dragon's character arc was coherent and satisfying, I really liked it, but it was a bit unsatisfying that

he and Agnieszka never really talked about their feelings

. I get what the author was going for, but it just annoyed me that

so many things were left unsaid, like constantly

. But I did really like the part where

Agnieszka recognized he was scared to put down roots and was running away, now that he’d 1) lost his cold stone tower, 2) drank Spindle-water, and 3) held her hand. And I’m glad he came back, that was nice

. That was the part where everything really paid off, to me.
I really loved the Dragon and Agnieszka’s partner dynamic

(separate from their romantic dynamic)

. They’re so different, they’re exactly what the other lacks, and Agnieszka learns to understand and accept him, and the Dragon learns to respect her as an equal and accept her way of looking at things as valid. Their growing relationship and mutual respect was really great, but

the romance just fell flat. It was too little and too much at the same time. It was little enough that it felt irrelevant, but too much that the moments where the romantic element came together felt unearned, emotionless, and poorly-done.

I feel a bit mixed about the ending. It felt a little abstract to me, and the whole book is abstract, and like I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but I feel like my brain didn’t quite wrap around it well enough to feel fully satisfied. Maybe with another read in the future hindsight will help me know which parts are important to pay attention to, to understand the ending.

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saintyeehaw's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I kept rooting for this book and it kind of kept letting me down, sadly. I fell in love with the magic system, the visualizations of spell casting, the descriptions of reading the Summoning, and the dark horror of the Wood. Unfortunately, Sarkan's never ending verbal abuse toward Nieshka, her being 17 to his 150, the weird sympathetic framing of a rapist, and the inclusion of only one explicitly black character just to have her be the daughter of a slave really soured me on the whole thing.

I'll just rant here. The fact that Sarkan chooses specifically girls (never explained why boys aren't chosen if everyone with the gift must be trained) and expects them to cook all his meals for him for ten years was already irredeemable in my eyes. His constant berating of Nieshka literally left her EXPECTING abuse multiple times throughout the book which left me feeling sick at its romanticization. Truly, Sarkan's only traits were that he liked cleanliness and that he was mean. Their hideous age gap (of literally a child and a very old man) being framed as his excuse to momentarily hesitate from sex with her? yikes. Why did she need to be 17? I would have much preferred reading about an adult woman and her ages old immortal boyfriend. Lastly, the rape scene was handled unbelievably poorly and just made Sarkan even more monstrous to me.

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No

5.0

I thoroughly enjoyed the two books by Naomi Novik that I’ve read previously (Spinning Silver and A Deadly Education), and like I do every time I encounter two books by the same author that I love, I immediately set out to read all of that author’s other works to see if any of them are less good.

So far, no. Uprooted is just as good as the others.

Admittedly, it started out a little rough. The entire back cover is more setup than actual plot, and it’s skimmed over, mostly as exposition, in chapter one. But I kept going, because I wanted it to be good and because I remembered Spinning Silver was heavy on the exposition in the beginning and then it turned out fantastic.

The same thing happened here. What started as a very simple story – the wizard-lord of the valley takes a girl every ten years and the protagonist is taken – gradually unfolds like a blooming rose, revealing deeper and deeper levels of complexity and magic. The corruption in the Wood is sentient, plotting. It wants to take the valley and move on to take the world. The Dragon stands against its power, holding it back with fire and magic.

And then comes Agnieszka, brave and stubborn and full of deep caring for her people and rooted deep to the land the Wood wants to claim. She has to do two things the Dragon considered impossible before he would take her seriously, but she doesn’t give up and she is amazing. Agnieszka grows, the Dragon softens, and the characters are inseparable from the story and the land.

Since what’s on the back cover is so little of the story, I feel like I can’t say too much without spoilers. Which really sucks, because there is so much to the plot (the audiobook was 18 hours) that I would love to talk about. This book doesn’t follow standard story structures, which makes it feel more real – I can’t map it onto any fiction-writing templates, it ebbs and flows like real life. There were no less than three places that I thought must have been the climax and then saw there were several more hours of story to go. And I absolutely adore that in the end, even the antagonist was worthy of compassion and violence wasn’t the answer. (I don’t feel like that’s a spoiler since you won’t even know what antagonist I’m talking about until the last hour and a half of the book.)

I don’t often have the patience for audiobooks longer than 10 hours or so, but Uprooted deserved 18 hours of my attention and I would have happily given it more. Like the other two of Naomi’s books I’ve read, its delicious complexity slowly unfolds into something dark and rich and beautiful. I can’t put into words my adoration of this book but trust me: Read it.

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tieflingkisser's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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