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Oct. 10th, 2015 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsLike almost everyone else, I thought Naomi Novik's Uprooted was pretty fantastic.
It started out feeling very comfortably familiar to me, a top-notch version YA Beauty and the Beast story -- the two most immediate comparisons for me were Robin McKinley and, uh, a much better-written version of Mercedes Lackey's Fire Rose, I'M SORRY. But you guys know the kind of story I mean, right? There's an awkward teenage girl, and she has to leave everything she knows to go live with a powerful, mysterious, somewhat monstrous figure, and in the course of it the monster is revealed to be human and vulnerable, and the girl comes into her own probably-magical power, and they most likely fall in love in a way that metaphorically signifies the shift in power dynamics and the heroine coming of age. YOU KNOW.
I like those stories, and I was all prepared to enjoy the story that I thought this was, but in fact that's really only about the first third of the book and then EVERYTHING ELSE STARTS HAPPENING A LOT.
While the Beauty and the Beast story gives Agnieszka a framework for her romance and coming of age, most of the heart and the plot of the book is tied up in the heroine's relationship with her hometown and, specifically, her best friend Kasia, both of which are inextricably tied to a monstrous and malevolent forest. Then powerful people find out about this, and everything escalates very quickly, and suddenly there's royalty and kingdom-threatening forces and court drama --
-- and, OK, to be honest, I actually did not care very much about the interlude of court drama and I think some of it could probably have been cut out of the book; it's all quite page-turney, and I liked the other wizards (Alosha!), but, like, what is the purpose of the Mean Girl who briefly befriends our heroine only to turn out to have been secretly laughing at her at parties all along? That feels like a sequence that came out of a different fantasy-of-manners kind of book. Uprooted is not fantasy of manners. It's not really about kings and courts. At heart, Uprooted is a fantasy about a village girl, and the tie that she has to her village, and to the forest and the land around it. The forest is at the beginning and the end of this book. That's what gives Agnieszka her power, and honestly, it's what gives the book its power too. Uprooted is at its best and strongest when it's most grounded.
Other thoughts: I am not really anti-the romance, like, as I've said, it's a Beauty and the Beast story and it works exactly as it's meant to, and does it well. (And Naomi Novik is very good at writing compelling romantic doing-magic-together scenes.) But it did spur a lot of thoughts in me about immortals (or near-immortals) dating young persons, and age differences and maturity differences, etc. Not new thoughts, just kind of the same old thoughts, but I would like to mention them anyway.
Also I wanted so much more of Kasia after The Thing that happens -- once they go to court she becomes a little bit of a plot point, and I want to know so much more about her as a character, how she adapts to the KIND OF MAJOR changes in basically everything about her and her life. I mean, there's no room in the book for a Kasia POV, so ... I guess that's what Yuletide is for? MORE KASIA. (And Alosha!)
It started out feeling very comfortably familiar to me, a top-notch version YA Beauty and the Beast story -- the two most immediate comparisons for me were Robin McKinley and, uh, a much better-written version of Mercedes Lackey's Fire Rose, I'M SORRY. But you guys know the kind of story I mean, right? There's an awkward teenage girl, and she has to leave everything she knows to go live with a powerful, mysterious, somewhat monstrous figure, and in the course of it the monster is revealed to be human and vulnerable, and the girl comes into her own probably-magical power, and they most likely fall in love in a way that metaphorically signifies the shift in power dynamics and the heroine coming of age. YOU KNOW.
I like those stories, and I was all prepared to enjoy the story that I thought this was, but in fact that's really only about the first third of the book and then EVERYTHING ELSE STARTS HAPPENING A LOT.
While the Beauty and the Beast story gives Agnieszka a framework for her romance and coming of age, most of the heart and the plot of the book is tied up in the heroine's relationship with her hometown and, specifically, her best friend Kasia, both of which are inextricably tied to a monstrous and malevolent forest. Then powerful people find out about this, and everything escalates very quickly, and suddenly there's royalty and kingdom-threatening forces and court drama --
-- and, OK, to be honest, I actually did not care very much about the interlude of court drama and I think some of it could probably have been cut out of the book; it's all quite page-turney, and I liked the other wizards (Alosha!), but, like, what is the purpose of the Mean Girl who briefly befriends our heroine only to turn out to have been secretly laughing at her at parties all along? That feels like a sequence that came out of a different fantasy-of-manners kind of book. Uprooted is not fantasy of manners. It's not really about kings and courts. At heart, Uprooted is a fantasy about a village girl, and the tie that she has to her village, and to the forest and the land around it. The forest is at the beginning and the end of this book. That's what gives Agnieszka her power, and honestly, it's what gives the book its power too. Uprooted is at its best and strongest when it's most grounded.
Other thoughts: I am not really anti-the romance, like, as I've said, it's a Beauty and the Beast story and it works exactly as it's meant to, and does it well. (And Naomi Novik is very good at writing compelling romantic doing-magic-together scenes.) But it did spur a lot of thoughts in me about immortals (or near-immortals) dating young persons, and age differences and maturity differences, etc. Not new thoughts, just kind of the same old thoughts, but I would like to mention them anyway.
Also I wanted so much more of Kasia after The Thing that happens -- once they go to court she becomes a little bit of a plot point, and I want to know so much more about her as a character, how she adapts to the KIND OF MAJOR changes in basically everything about her and her life. I mean, there's no room in the book for a Kasia POV, so ... I guess that's what Yuletide is for? MORE KASIA. (And Alosha!)
