Uprooted
tells the story of Agnieszka and Kasia, two girls from a tiny town in a fantasy
version of medieval Poland. The forest nearby is alien and dangerous, so
there’s a sorcerer who protects the valley and its residents, but he takes a
girl from the villages every ten years. After their ten years are over, the
girls never want to stay in their home villages anymore, but move to the city.
The sorcerer, called the Dragon, always picks the girl with something special,
the one who has that extra sparkle, so Agnieszka and Kasia and everyone else
are sure he will choose Kasia. Instead, he chooses Agnieszka, who is suddenly
yanked out of the only home she’s ever known and transported to the Dragon’s
tower.
Agnieszka
has magical powers, it turns out, and Kasia doesn’t. The Dragon by law has to
train anyone with magical powers. Agnieszka suffers under the Dragon’s tuition,
though, until she discovers that her own homegrown form of magic works much
better for her than the Dragon’s rigid, strict formulas. There’s a wonderfully
subversive thread to this story, arguing that what comes naturally can be much
more powerful and less painful than the tradition-bound patriarchal form of
academic magic. What’s implied but never followed through is that the villagers
are much closer to the woods and draw their power from there. In fact, the
Dragon says that the girls stay in his tower for so long that their magical
roots in the valley wither and die, and that’s why they never go back home. But
we never see that idea followed to its logical conclusion, which is that the
forest is powerful, not evil, and must be treated with respect and understood
in order for the valley residents to coexist with it and use their natural
power. It’s strongly implied that fighting one’s own nature causes disruption
and evil, but the forest, called the Wood, is still considered an unexamined
negative force.
The
Wood is the biggest threat Agnieszka and the Dragon and everyone in the valley
know. Their world is fairly small and self-contained. The Wood isn’t just a
fairy tale forest full of wolves and bears and witches. It’s actively hostile
to people and domesticated animals. There is something called “corruption” that
gets inside any living thing and turns it evil. The Dragon is able to force the
corruption to show itself and can drive it out of Agnieszka when she gets a
slight infection saving her village. Agnieszka then uses his methods to save
Kasia when she gets taken prisoner by a tree. But Kasia is so far gone that
even when she’s saved, she’s essentially tree people, a human being with living
wood inside her, incredible strength and stamina, and new abilities. Notice
that Kasia isn’t evil, though!
This
is where the novel falls down. I expected that we would learn that the Wood was
not evil after all, that the ignorant valley people just didn’t understand its
power or how to live with it in peace instead of at war. That’s what happened
with the Dragon’s magic and it was set up in many ways. Kasia then would have
been a sort of emissary from the Wood to the humans and could help bridge the
gaps and bring about peace. Instead, an awful prince hears about Kasia’s
transformation, the only person ever rescued from the Wood, and forces
Agnieszka and Kasia to help him rescue his mother, taken prisoner by a powerful
tree twenty years ago. It’s a doomed expedition and all of the bright sunshine
and cheerful soldiers turn to death and darkness, in a sequence straight out of
medieval epic. Agnieszka and Kasia and the Dragon manage to rescue the queen,
but she’s an empty shell.
Again,
what a lost opportunity! All this violence and death and loss and the
culmination of a terrible expedition is just waste and nothingness. The queen
is not there anymore, just her body. They take the queen back to the king, only
to find that the king has to judge whether she’s infected by corruption. If she
is, she dies, by law—and then Kasia will die, too.
Agnieszka
wants to save Kasia, her main driving force throughout the novel, so she wants
to save the queen. Again, there’s a huge missed opportunity here. The queen
should be an emissary from the Wood, even if she’s just possessed by a tree
spirit or something like that. They brought the human queen’s body out, and she
eventually wakes up, but as we discover through a massive undigested chunk of
exposition, the person inside her is actually a tree queen from hundreds of
years ago who married a human and was betrayed and started this whole war
between the Wood and the humans. Except nobody knows this! We never find out
until it’s all over. And once we find out, we don’t care. We don’t know these
people.
Lesson
number one of Uprooted: don’t explain everything in one huge blast of
exposition near the end of the book. By that time, it’s far too late. We don’t
care about these people in the distant past. They have no emotional resonance
at all. We’re heavily invested in the people in the present, who just get shelved
while we hear about all of this ancient history. It doesn’t work in any sense,
not dramatically, not narratively, not in terms of tension. We need to know all
of this sooner, so we can put the pieces together ourselves. Imagine if Novik
had infused the culture of the valley with this myth about the tree queen. Then
we might have been able to suspect what was really going on with the kidnapped
queen. And why have her empty for a while and then repossessed?
There
were all sorts of major story decisions in the second half of this novel that
really did not work, but they all followed from the same mistake, hiding the
secret that we didn’t know was a secret. It’s not like we were wondering, “Hey,
I wonder if there was some secret tree queen that married a human hundreds of
years ago?” So basically all that exposition answers questions nobody was
asking, and in the most disappointing way possible. I was actually angry while
reading that part, it was such a digression from the otherwise powerfully
compelling story. I wanted to know what our people were doing and choosing and
saying!
In
the end, Agnieszka leaves the city and the tower and the Dragon and goes back
to the valley to help mend relations between her people and the Wood. Such a
great ending! I would have loved to see it set up more instead of just suddenly
happening. There is so much good thematic material about natural and
artificial, living with nature versus cut off in a city, finding our own ways
of doing things versus adopting a rigid and uncomfortable imposed order.
The
Dragon and Agnieszka fall in love somewhere in the middle of the story, despite
the fact that he is only ever rude and cruel to her—another major problem—and
at the end, he comes to join her in her village. But how on earth can they
possibly live together when he can’t stay in the village and she won’t leave
it? This resolution is left hanging.
And
where is Kasia, the driving force of the first three quarters of the novel? She
takes some royal children off to a city by the sea and we never see her again.
That’s a major failure and unfulfilled promise, unfortunately. Kasia has been
the key to the story all along. She should be there with Agnieszka right up
until the end, using her transformation into a tree person to help change the
world for the valley’s residents. Kasia, Agnieszka’s best friend, the person we
see her care the most about throughout the novel, the person who is part tree
herself, should be integral to Agnieszka’s quest to reconcile the people and
the trees.
This
is an epic fantasy novel with wonderfully inventive ideas, but I found the lack
of set-up and payoff troubling. The failures forced me to grapple with story
elements in a way I don’t usually do. I’ve certainly learned a tremendous
amount, and for that I’m grateful. And I could not put this book down when I
was reading it. It’s gigantic but I read it in one afternoon and evening. More
than anything, I want to learn to have this kind of distance from my own work,
so that I can see this type of problem clearly myself and rewrite to solve it.
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