Sunday, December 27, 2015


Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

Thinking about this book and how to review it, I'm reminded of a quote from Lindsay Hill's Sea of Hooks: "Grief keeps coming back with the same things in its hands--Grief comes back again, its hands full of the same things arranged differently" — at first, simply because the writer of Uprooted manages to take elements common to many fantasy/magic stories and arrange them in a fresh way, but the more I consider it, the more ways I see this quote is applicable: the protagonist, a hedgewitch of sorts, and her wizard foil use the same magic but manipulate it in different ways, and grief is at the root of the immense evil they must fight against together.

I liked this book more than I expected I would. I almost didn't even read it, and now I can easily say it's one of the best books I read in 2015, an exciting book that kept me up late reading. Though I may not be qualified to say so, I feel as if the main character is more feminist than some of the popular strong/bad-ass female characters of recent years. (Yes, Katniss, I'm talking about you.) Uprooted has a dash of romance, too, and a conclusive yet not entirely resolved ending that is open in a way that suggests future possibilities for the characters without being obvious groundwork for a sequel.


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