Uprooted

Publisher's Summary

Naomi Novik, author of the New York Times best-selling and critically acclaimed Temeraire novels, introduces a bold new world rooted in folk stories and legends, as elemental as a Grimm fairy tale.

"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 10 years. He protects us against the Wood, and we're grateful, but not that grateful."

Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life.

Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for 10 years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood.

The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows - everyone knows - that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia - all the things Agnieszka isn't, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her.

But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.

©2015 Naomi Novik (P)2015 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

• Nebula Award for Best Novel, 2015

"The magic in Uprooted, with its realistic moral dimension, is so vividly believable that it almost seems you could work the spells. But the book will do that for you." (Ursula K. Le Guin, award-winning and best-selling author of The Earthsea cycle)

" Uprooted has everything I love: a great heroine, new takes on old myths and legends, and surprising twists and turns. A delight." (Cassandra Clare, New York Times best-selling author of The Mortal Instruments series)

"Wild, thrilling, and deeply, darkly magical. An instant classic." (Lev Grossman, number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Magicians Trilogy)

A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (With Terrifying Trees)

"Uprooted" feels like a forgotten fairy tale that somehow slipped out of our common culture, but would be right at home next to Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and all the rest. There's magic, wizards, princes, and evil forests. (WOW, the evil trees are AWESOME. But we'll come back to those later.) But despite that sense of familiarity, I can't think of too many other books like it. In some ways it reminds of Neil Gaiman's "Stardust," and in other ways of Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell." Maybe a dash of Katherine Addison's "The Goblin Emperor." It's charming like those books, and yet it's also very much its own story.

Agnieszka is a fantasy heroine for the ages. She's messy, kind, stubborn, bumbling yet brilliant when it comes to magic. I loved how devoted she is to her friend Kasia (and how loyal Kasia is to her). Her relationship with the Dragon could've felt like a revamped Beauty & the Beast, or Pygmalion, and maybe there are hints of all that here. But Novik twists all those tropes and stories and comes up with a relationship and storyline that feels fresh. At it's heart, this is a story of love (not only the romantic kind, although there is that too) and friendship.

Can we talk about the forest and the trees? Because Novik has created some of the most horrifying evil trees I think I've ever read, and it's kind of delightful how vile and terrifying they are. The bark, the sap, the branches...the descriptions and details were terrifying (and delicious).

Julia Emelin's narration has come under a lot of criticism, which baffles me. Because of the Russian accent? Honestly, I cannot figure it out. After reading the reviews, I previewed the narration before I purchased the book, and remained puzzled -- Emelin's voice and accent helped ground tone for the story. I was captivated by every minute of her performance. Novik spun an incredible tale, and Emelin's narration complimented it to perfection.

"Uprooted" is one of my favorite listens in the last year. It feels like a story we've known our whole lives, even if we're just hearing it for the first time. And it's one I'll want to hear again and again and again.

88 of 91 people found this review helpful

The Narrator?!

The setting, pacing, world building and character development are all well and fine. It gets off to a bit of a slow start, but if you can make it through the first couple chapters you get some real tension, encounter a mystery that needs solving, and it draws you in.

But the narrator.

The story is told from the perspective of the main character, who (apparently) speaks with a moderately heavy accent. Something like a cross between Spanish middle class and Russian businesswoman. The enunciation, tone, and the hard stops between sentences, gives the impression of someone reading a shopping list. It's bizarre and extremely distracting from the story itself.

19 of 19 people found this review helpful

Narration is a Serious Issue

Trying to engage with the story and overlook the difficulties with the narration but audiobooks by their nature, make this an obstacle.

It isn't the accent that's at issue but the expression. Like other reviewers before me, I'm experiencing a challenge with the intonation and sentence cadence. It is similar to using an enabled audio feature on a webpage where an automated voice reads the words but doesn't impart any meaning. Comprehension is harder because one has to reconcile the odd cadence (pauses and emphasis are unexpected), discern the sentence structure, and figure out the story.

I want to finish the book but not sure if I can endure the automaton narration. :(

66 of 71 people found this review helpful

Charming, creepy and unique

Uprooted is an incredible story, completely absorbing and not at all what I expected. It feels like the real story that a thousand grim fairytales were based on. Surprisingly real, unpredictable and without the simplistic morality.

The narration is brilliant. The accent and the narrator's performance really brings the story alive. It made me feel as though Agnieszka herself was telling her story to me. It must have felt like a bit of a gamble, to use someone with an authentic accent, but it was very effective.

I cannot think of another novel to compare this to, but it did put me a bit in mind of the movie Pan's Labrynth - at times beautiful, charming and genuinely creepy.

This is hands down the best fantasy novel I have experienced in a long time, it's reawakened my love of the genre.

21 of 22 people found this review helpful

Great story, hard to listen to.

It isn't the accent so much as the woodenness of the narration that makes this a little frustrating to listen to. The story is great, but the reading really detracts from it.

205 of 223 people found this review helpful

A Wonderful Tale Well Told!

This is one of those stories that causes one to heave a contented sigh when it ends.
Naomi Novik has written a tale that reminded me of some of Peter Falk's lines from The Princess Bride, "revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes..." Yet none of this story is in the usual way. It is not a humorous story, but it is a tale of wonder.
Agnieszka, (a mouthful of a name), simple village girl, infuriatingly clumsy, untidy, seemingly slow; handed over to serve the wizard of the tower. He is called Dragon, impatient, cold, unkind, proud and arrogant.
There is an evil wood which is slowly expanding, overwhelming the land spreading grim darkness, evil and monsters. The Dragon is trying to keep the wood from growing but is not succeeding.
The tale unfolds with many other characters adding to a story more complex and nuanced with each chapter. It's quite a long tale and Agnieszka herself tells the story.
Some readers complained about the performance by Julia Emelin. I rather liked her Eastern European accent (though I have no idea how accurate it may be). It made the story more authentic in a way, even if it was at times a little difficult to understand.
Listen to the sample and judge for yourself. If you don't care for her performance, then read the book, it is a satisfying experience and worth the time.

38 of 41 people found this review helpful

Don't put yourself through this listen

This is the worst narrator I've listened to, bar none. Buy this book in paperback and save your ears.

The narrator's voice is so heavily accented that I was frequently unsure of what word it was that she was attempting to pronounce (was that "clothing," "clawing," or "clearing"? "feeling" or "filing"? "onion," "oven," or "open"?) and at some points literally couldn't understand her at all. If this had been a personal memoir narrated by the author or something, this sort of narration style could serve an interesting purpose, but this is fantasy; there's no "real" way of pronouncing the non-English words.

The worst bit, though, was that she had the cadence and emotion of a robot. Words that are italicized or followed with exclamation points in the book sound no different coming from the narrator's mouth as words without emphasis. Her timing was bizarrely off as well; it was impossible to tell when half the sentences ended and new ones began.

I could also understand why you'd want the narrator to pronounce the few words in the book's invented language with a realistic sounding accent, but the entirety of the rest of the book was sacrificed to this aim.

18 of 19 people found this review helpful

Tedious Task

I don't usually like to post bad reviews. Maybe its just the narration, but this just feels like I'm trying to finish a tedious chore instead of engaging in an enchanted escape. I am not usually that hard to please but the last few audios have not worked out for me and this book has been my least favorite so far.

The accent is making it hard for me to get lost in the story because I end up focusing on the task of trying to understand what most of the sentences are that she is speaking. I don't think I am going to finish. I am on chapter five and it has taken way to long for me to get that far. I will sleep on the decision of finishing it not. However, if I don't read further, I will ask for a refund of my credit.

I suggest that potential readers of this book should listen to the sample before buying. If the narrators accent doesn't bother you, then perhaps you will enjoy the story as well.

Thank you and good luck!!

104 of 118 people found this review helpful

Wonderful story TERRIBLE narrator

It is a testament to how great the story is that I enjoyed it even though the narrator is absolutely the worst. I loved the story. I love it so much I’m buying it on kindle to read smoothly. I’m astounded that someone let her read this book aloud for money. I get that an accent can make this type of story interesting, and the other audible book from this author is WONDERFUL. But this one? The narrator’s words are so choppy and her pronunciation is just awful. The narrator doesn’t bother to try to change her voice to differentiate characters- or maybe she tried but was unsuccessful. She. Enunciates. Or. Pauses. After. Every. Word. Or sometimes she. Pauses after. A. Couple of. Words. But she just does not read well or tell the story. She. Just. Reads. With. Lots. Of breaks. If this were re-done with someone who speaks smoothly, even with a heavy accent, I would re-purchase because the story is just that delightful.

12 of 13 people found this review helpful

A little village near a Dark Wood...

Agnieszka is the daughter of a woodcutter, living in a quiet village in a peaceful valley--bounded by a menacing Wood where dark forces lurk. The Dragon, a cold and remote wizard, is their valley's defense against the Wood, but there is a price: every ten years, he chooses one seventeen-year-old girl to serve him for the next ten years. The girls emerge from the tower at the end of their service seemingly unharmed, but changed. They don't stay in the valley; they take the dowry the Dragon gives them and move elsewhere. Admittedly to prosperous, successful lives, but leaving the valley seems unimaginable.

Agnieszka and her best friend, Kasia, are "Dragon-born," i.e., seventeen years old in the year the Dragon will next claim a new servant. Everyone knows that that new servant will be Kasia. Kasia is everything the Dragon looks for--beautiful, clever, kind, and brave. Agnieszka dreads losing her friend forever.

But when the day comes, it's not Kasia the Dragon takes away to his tower; it's Agnieszka. Grumpily, reluctantly, he announces that he "had better" take Agnieszka.

Because the Dragon does not explain anything, it's quite a while before she begins to understand why the Dragon decided he "had better" take her rather than Kasia.

Agnieszka has embarked, unknowingly, on an adventure that will take both her and Kasia to the Wood, to the capital, and on a journey of self-discovery that holds the potential to bring salvation or destruction on everything she loves.

Once I started Uprooted, I couldn't stop till I was done. Agnieszka is stubborn, argumentative, kind, and loyal. The Dragon is slowly revealed as a complicated, difficult character, with real strengths and real flaws. Kasia, too, is much more than the rather simplistic role everyone had unconsciously assigned her. Even Prince Marek, who in a superficial reading is assigned a "bad guy" role, is a good deal more layered than that simple role, brave, egotistical, seeing through manipulative scheming, ambitious, rebuking a lord for imposing too-high taxes rather than punishing the peasant who stole a sheep because of the burden of those taxes. Right to the end, I had real doubt about how Marek would turn out--and how he turned out remained complicated.

I want to say lots more about Agnieszka here, what she learns, what she accomplishes, and her complex, layered relationship with the Dragon, but every time I try I wind up deleting it as too spoiler-y. Read the book! Get to know her!

This book is a Hugo finalist this year, and it thoroughly deserves to be. Highly recommended.

I bought this book.

20 of 23 people found this review helpful