Reading recco: Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
A delightful lit-fantasy
New year, new series!
I want to change things up in the new year. go beyond the essay form, write about stuff that gets the juices flowing for the writer in me. Talk about books, videos, podcasts and Substacks that inspire me.
Here’s the first of many.
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Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.
He doesn’t devour them really; it only feels that way. He takes a girl to his tower, and ten years later he lets her go, but by then she’s someone different. Her clothes are too fine and she talks like a courtier and she’s been living alone with a man for ten years, so of course she’s ruined, even though the girls all say he never puts a hand on them. What else could they say? And that’s not the worst of it—after all, the Dragon gives them a purse full of silver for their dowry when he lets them go, so anyone would be happy to marry them, ruined or not.
- Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
The opening paragraph grabs you by the lapels. The second paragraph confuses a little, stokes curiosity. There’s a dragon, there’s a tower. The dragon is a man who ‘chooses’ girls, ‘doesn’t eat them’, probably ‘doesn’t lay a hand on them’ but it’s still the trade he asks for in order to keep the village safe from the Woods.
Packed with detail that’s emulsified by a sharp, clear-eyed narrator voice, the book takes you into its world with the ease of a knife cutting through water.
Here’s a review I particularly liked:
The magical struggles are not only exciting, but they showcase Novik’s ability to write magic that is emotionally evocative and pleasingly non-mechanical… And, though this isn’t immediately apparent, Agnieszka’s different experience of, and approach toward, magic is a matter of her personality and background, not gender, as I’d also feared based on the opening. - tor.com.
I’d love to get some lit-fantasy recommendations from you. Please share them in the comments!