I have a confession to make. I’m a huge sucker. I’m a girl who loves a good story about the impossible. Give me a story about dragons, unicorns, witches, you name it, I’ll eat it up. I think it’s that kid in me that loved watching Star Trek: The Next Generation or seaQuest DSV wanting to escape into another world. Side note: if you have not watched seaQuest, you need to. It’s got talking dolphins, underwater adventures and Jonathon Brandis, AKA, my teenage crush.
I’ve cut my teeth on magic missions from Harry and Hermione to Frodo and Sam to Quintin and Julia and loved every new world that I’ve stumbled across. When I was younger I liked my fantasy with more than a hint of romance that contained a damsel in distress that needed saving. Now, older and wiser, I like my fantasies with a kickass heroine who can save her damn self and her so called hero.
Looking for those kind of stories is how I stumbled on Uprooted. I picked it up on a whim. I hadn’t really heard a lot about it but it kept popping up every time I pulled up Amazon saying that I would love it. And the gods of Amazon were not wrong! I did love it and the world that Ms. Novak created.
The book follows Agnieszka, a young girl in a faraway village. She is just one of many girls in this poor village who is facing an unclear future, one filled with uncertainty and fear. And while you might be thinking ‘well it sounds like it’s set in the medieval ages and everybody always dies’, you wouldn’t be wrong. But Agnieszka has bigger fish to fry than worrying about the Black Plague or childbirth. She and the other girls are facing the probability of being chosen to be taken by the Dragon.
It seems that every 10 years, the Dragon comes down from the tower he keeps in their Valley and takes the girl. He does this as exchange of payment for keeping the valley mostly from harm from The Wood. He takes the girl back to this tower to keep for a decade during which time they are never seen. That is until the decade is over and they return to their village, changed. It’s time for Agnieszka to stand in front of the Dragon and allow him to chose the girl. She’s sure that he will chose her best friend, Kasia, because Kasia is gorgeous, always well put together and has many skills of how to take care of a man. *wink wink* You know what I’m talking about.
But anyway, Agnieszka, as well as all the others in the village, does not realize that beauty is the least of the Dragon’s wants in the girl he chooses. He wants a companion and someone who will help him battle the Wood. And this time he think Agnieszka will be the help he needs.
What follows is a magical adventure that pits Agnieszka and the Dragon against the Wood as well as themselves. They are an unlikely pair but one drawn together by a common goal of saving the valley from the evil that lives in the Wood. The adventure sucks you in this book and you can see the fire-heart potion fighting the trees, burning everything it touches while the pair try to control the magic swarming within them. The first paragraph of the book was enough to make me grab it off the shelf, clutch it close to my chest and hurry to the cash register.
“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 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.”
Like, oh my goodness! How awesome is that?!?! Ms. Novak created a story that brings to mind Grimm’s Fairy Tales or ancient hero stories with overgrown monsters with a clear view of who the villain is. And in a world where sometimes it hard to see who is the villain of your life, it’s good to see that good can still do battle with evil, fighting for the world. I loved Agnieszka and how much of a spitfire she was. She may have been taken by the Dragon but she wasn’t going to let him get the last word no matter what. Also she was constantly getting dirty or her hair was out of place and I can relate to that completely!
I am giving this 4 out of 5 stars mainly because I listened the audiobook along with reading and I HATED the audio. I swear the reader had the worst accent, which I was under the impression was faked but after further research discovered was just her own terrible voice. So unless you like trying to understand what word was just said, I’d steer clear of it. Plus the cover for the book is gorgeous so go with that instead.
Anne Read’s and Reviews 