(It should be mentioned at this point that our grumpy hero, Sarkan aka The Dragon, is a neat freak, and, yes, the conflict between him and our messy heroine on this front is just as amusing as one could hope for.) “How do you do this to yourself?” he asked me, almost marveling, one day when I wandered in with a clump of rice pudding in my hair-I had accidentally hit a spoon with my elbow and flung some into the air-and a huge streak of jam going all the way down my front of beautiful cream silk. She’s also clumsy and frequently spills things, and it’s so nice to see the non-adorable consequences of this represented in fiction. The story is told entirely in her voice, and her arc forms the story’s core as we watch her grow from awkward village girl to self-assured sorceress. She’s messy, stubborn, big-hearted, uneducated but intelligent. Let’s start with our heroine, Agnieszka (Ag-NYESH-kah). My copy of Uprooted with bonus cameo by my cat Kestrel I own multiple copies and have re-read it countless times. Uprooted is somehow simultaneously epic fantasy about saving the world and small-scale cozy fantasy (that’s a genre, right?) about the comforts of home.
It’s partly the dreamy prose and partly the setting, which is alive and magical and sinister in the form of the malevolent Wood. Uprooted isn’t technically a fairytale retelling, butit certainly feels like one. And once you’re that far in, well, if you’re me you won’t be able to stop, even if it is after midnight. How can you possibly stop there? It’s clearly necessary to keep reading at least as long as it takes to find out that the Dragon is a wizard who lives in a tower, and that he takes a village girl to serve him every ten years. Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. Sometimes a book draws you in so completely that you only remember you meant to go to bed hours ago after you emerge, blinking, from the very last page.
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