Uprooted

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Once again, I like assholes. I like anti-heroes, but they have to self-redeeming. The "Dragon" in this book is none such.

Agnieszka worries for her best friend, Kasia, who is the most beautiful girl in the village. Everyone is sure Kasia will be snatched up by the Dragon at the next Choosing. Instead, much to her surprise, Agnieszka is chosen to serve the Dragon, and that's when she discovered how dark and frightening the world really is. He called her intolerable and crazy in one sentence and then he kissed her. This is only the first kiss. The fact that many gushed over The Dragon disturbed me. This dude is abusive. ABUSE IS NOT ROMANTIC. Verbal or physical otherwise. STOP THIS SHIT, AUTHORS. Place yourself in Agnieszka's shoes. Put more imaginations on how YOU would feel if you were being treated like all those ways I pointed out. Honestly, I was feeling a bit of trepidation before reading this, and I'm very happy to say that I didn't have any issues with the novel. So let’s talk about the woods. The woods are the antagonist in this story. It’s a novel idea, one that made this feel like a dark fairy tale. I loved that; it worked. It more than worked it was rather brilliant. But it could have been better. I think a prelude demonstrating the dark nature of it would have helped to establish it as a real threat, rather than an irrational fear, very early on. Then there’s how the wood ended. Now that was so very disappointing! It was too fast. One minute the wood is practically an invincible enemy, the next it’s defeated in vague circumstances. It was just too fast to be effective!

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A dark enchantment blights the land in the award-winning Uprooted – a enthralling fantasy inspired by fairy tales, by Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire series. This novel is too dense. It's too layered and runs from one plot to another without giving us time to digest the previous one, making this one tough cookie to swallow. When it's not the overly descriptive surroundings, it's the tedious never ending rendition of magic, one that, by the way, still left a lot to be desired. Reading Uprooted was like rediscovering a favorite old sweater, familiar and beloved. It feels as if it has always existed and has been waiting patiently for me to return to it.” —Maggie Stiefvater If you love fairy tale-ish books - and don't mind if things get bleak and violent for a while - and haven't read this book yet, I strongly recommend Uprooted!

That was the end of the story: no one went into the Wood and came out again, at least not whole and themselves. Sometimes they came out blind and screaming, sometimes they came out twisted and so misshapen they couldn’t be recognized; and worst of all sometimes they came out with their own faces but murder behind them, something gone dreadfully wrong within.” Kasia is Agnieszka's best and only friend. She is also the girl that everyone expected the Dragon to choose. So imagine my dismay when shortly after she escapes that fate, she is abducted by one of the Wood's foul creatures. The main characters and their romance were some of the worst problems for me in this book. Kasia, the side character, would’ve been a much better choice for a protagonist compared to Agnieszka; I’ll dub her as Agony because it captured my feeling towards her. Agony is a Mary Sue, and she’s the epitome of Special Snowflake Syndrome. To make things worse, the Dragon, Skunk, Skank, or whatever his real name is was an ultimate asshole just for the sake of being one. From the beginning to the end, no organic development to these characters occurred. The flatness of their characterizations was even worse than a skateboard. Let's see how Raising Caine, The Grace of Kings, and Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard fare, shall we? :) Through notes left by previous girls, Agnieszka gathers that her role is mostly household duties. But the reason for his choice is that she has magical abilities, and he starts teaching her simple spells. Agnieszka finds these acts of magic difficult and unnatural.hmmmm...you are a tree, you have leaves. You grow branches...You are a tree...grow...grow...You are a tree and have leaves and branches...You are a tree...hmmm This book would have been far more effective had the friendship at the start been allowed more time to develop. It was thrown into the action that much, that when the romance came it made no sense. It didn’t have time to work; it just sprung and left me feeling a little surprised. It was a case of where did that come from? I think there should have been much more time spent in the tower, as the rest of the world was slowly, and gradually, revealed. That way this could have easily ended at the midway point. Each character is vivid and fully realized. In the Dragon we see someone who is not nice, at all, but who always gets things done. He’s rude and verbally abusive, but he constantly puts his life and wellbeing on the line to do what’s right and goes above and beyond what is expected of him, and never asks for any recognition in return. In contrast, we have everyone at court, like Marek and the Falcon, who are all flashy and politically savvy, and always manage to present themselves as celebrated heroes without actually doing anything useful. Both types are common in the real world, and this representation rang very true.