Naomi Novik: Uprooted

            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.