Nothing was how I expected it to be once I got past the safety of that first chapter, and it utterly thrilled me.įor example, the main character, Agnieszka, begins the book being clumsy, messy, and afraid. The story is dark and woven with magic and mystery, and it kept me guessing throughout. It doesn’t sound exciting at all when you say it that way, but trust me, that’s only chapter one, and from there onwards Naomi Novik turns all preconceptions of the plot on its head. He takes the awkward, plain girl instead. Everyone expects the lord to choose the beautiful, clever, and multi-talented best friend of said girl, but, shockingly, he does not. The premise was one that felt familiar to me as a lover of both folklore and fantasy novels a plain, village girl who lives on the outskirts of an enchanted and dangerous forest faces an enforced selection day by the local lord to live for ten years in his service. I found the echoes of those stories throughout Uprooted, worked artfully through the plot, the language, and the characters, and I fell in love. She put me to bed with myths and legends of the Black Forest and the stories of the Brothers Grimm, and not the nice, cutesy versions, either. I grew up on old, Germanic fairy-tales, courtesy of my Grandma who lived near Hamelin for almost twenty years.
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