Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
Sep. 27th, 2015 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynThis is less a review than me rambling about the tropes in the book. You've been warned.
Uprooted is a fantasy action/adventure novel. Reading this book was an odd experience. At about 30 pages in, I commented to some friends, "I'm trying to give this story a chance and not throw it across the room, but it's hard. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a romance between the 17 year-old first person narrator and her 150 year-old wizard-master who's a jerk. At which point I probably will throw it across the room.
"I'm not saying it's impossible to write a good romance with a first-person narrator who's a 17 year-old girl and a super-powerful 150 year-old male jerk, but ... actually, maybe I am saying that."
Shortly thereafter, one of my friends looked up the reviews and said, "It looks like it is a romance?"
But at that point I was 50 or 60 pages in, hints of a non-romance plot had appeared, and the narrator had stopped being a useless sack of self-pity, so I decided, somewhat grimly, to stick it out anyway. In part this is because I felt like I was being terribly unfair to the book. It has a bunch of elements that are similar to a story idea my brain keeps trying to convince me I want to write, and part of me is all "(a) you can't blame this book for not being the book you haven't written and (b) you shouldn't resent it for using tropes that you yourself want to use, seriously, how hypocritical is that?"
Anyway, Uprooted has a hate-at-first-sight romantic subplot between the 17 year old girl who's the first-person narrator and a 150 year old uber-powerful male jerk. There is pretty much nothing in that sentence that doesn't scream UNPROMISING at me. If that combination of tropes doesn't instantly rub you the wrong way, you should enjoy this book. For me, the romance turned out to be a minor enough subplot that I could pretty much ignore it.
The book contained a couple of other standard tropes that worked against it for me: a fairy-tale-medieval-European flavor to the setting, and a hand-wavey magic system where wizards could cast weirdly specific amazingly useful spells, with no clear demarcations on what can/can't be done by magic or why.
None of these tropes are innately bad. Some people like wizards who are very powerful and have no clear limits or thematic unity in their abilities. Magic is not used as a "cheat" in the story-- plot-critical spells are introduced before they become crucial. It's somewhat like the way magic is handled in the Harry Potter books. I like magic to be more clearly defined and thematically unified, and I like a sense that magic is integrated in the socio-economic fabric of the setting -- but that's a personal preference, not a reflection on quality.
What I'm trying to say is: this is a well-written, entertaining novel that happens to use a lot of tropes I don't care for. It's not you, book. It's me.
Tropes I dislike aside, the book had a number of qualities I did enjoy. The sinister antagonist embodies the Xanatos Gambit trope to good effect: many times that the protagonists think they've scored a win, it turns out the antagonist has a clever way to turn it against them. The descriptions of the way characters cast spells and their different styles of spell-casting are fun and elegant. The protagonists put their grab-bag of spells to good effect. While the narrator spends the early part of the book having things happen to her while she takes no effective actions whatsoever, she does spend most of the book asserting herself, often coming up with clever and useful ideas. The situations the narrator found herself in often changed quickly, and the suddenness and sometimes horror of these changes is well-captured. There really was a lot here to like. I do feel like some of the key plot points weren't telegraphed as well as would be ideal, but most of what I didn't like is covered by "tropes that don't suit my personal tastes." Anyway, I'll give it a 7, and am certainly open to reading more of Novik's work.
Uprooted is a fantasy action/adventure novel. Reading this book was an odd experience. At about 30 pages in, I commented to some friends, "I'm trying to give this story a chance and not throw it across the room, but it's hard. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a romance between the 17 year-old first person narrator and her 150 year-old wizard-master who's a jerk. At which point I probably will throw it across the room.
"I'm not saying it's impossible to write a good romance with a first-person narrator who's a 17 year-old girl and a super-powerful 150 year-old male jerk, but ... actually, maybe I am saying that."
Shortly thereafter, one of my friends looked up the reviews and said, "It looks like it is a romance?"
But at that point I was 50 or 60 pages in, hints of a non-romance plot had appeared, and the narrator had stopped being a useless sack of self-pity, so I decided, somewhat grimly, to stick it out anyway. In part this is because I felt like I was being terribly unfair to the book. It has a bunch of elements that are similar to a story idea my brain keeps trying to convince me I want to write, and part of me is all "(a) you can't blame this book for not being the book you haven't written and (b) you shouldn't resent it for using tropes that you yourself want to use, seriously, how hypocritical is that?"
Anyway, Uprooted has a hate-at-first-sight romantic subplot between the 17 year old girl who's the first-person narrator and a 150 year old uber-powerful male jerk. There is pretty much nothing in that sentence that doesn't scream UNPROMISING at me. If that combination of tropes doesn't instantly rub you the wrong way, you should enjoy this book. For me, the romance turned out to be a minor enough subplot that I could pretty much ignore it.
The book contained a couple of other standard tropes that worked against it for me: a fairy-tale-medieval-European flavor to the setting, and a hand-wavey magic system where wizards could cast weirdly specific amazingly useful spells, with no clear demarcations on what can/can't be done by magic or why.
None of these tropes are innately bad. Some people like wizards who are very powerful and have no clear limits or thematic unity in their abilities. Magic is not used as a "cheat" in the story-- plot-critical spells are introduced before they become crucial. It's somewhat like the way magic is handled in the Harry Potter books. I like magic to be more clearly defined and thematically unified, and I like a sense that magic is integrated in the socio-economic fabric of the setting -- but that's a personal preference, not a reflection on quality.
What I'm trying to say is: this is a well-written, entertaining novel that happens to use a lot of tropes I don't care for. It's not you, book. It's me.
Tropes I dislike aside, the book had a number of qualities I did enjoy. The sinister antagonist embodies the Xanatos Gambit trope to good effect: many times that the protagonists think they've scored a win, it turns out the antagonist has a clever way to turn it against them. The descriptions of the way characters cast spells and their different styles of spell-casting are fun and elegant. The protagonists put their grab-bag of spells to good effect. While the narrator spends the early part of the book having things happen to her while she takes no effective actions whatsoever, she does spend most of the book asserting herself, often coming up with clever and useful ideas. The situations the narrator found herself in often changed quickly, and the suddenness and sometimes horror of these changes is well-captured. There really was a lot here to like. I do feel like some of the key plot points weren't telegraphed as well as would be ideal, but most of what I didn't like is covered by "tropes that don't suit my personal tastes." Anyway, I'll give it a 7, and am certainly open to reading more of Novik's work.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 03:39 pm (UTC)I think Anita Blake was older than 17. That didn't make it a better story.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 03:48 pm (UTC)Anyway, Uprooted has a lot less sex than the Anita Blake books did by the time I gave up on reading the latter (around book 8? With Narcissus in Chains). The romance subplot is *really* minor. Like, you could cut out maybe 6 pages, describe their ultimate relationship as "close mentor/mentee friendship", and it wouldn't change anything.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 10:31 pm (UTC)(Seriously, having a huge stack of unread books makes me perversely less likely to read anything. A kind of analysis paralysis, maybe, but it's more like that feeling when you have so much on your to-do list that you go AHHHHHH and play video games instead of any of it.)
no subject
Date: 2022-06-25 05:40 am (UTC)One thing about audio books is that they keep going at you even when you're bored, and if you just let them play sometimes you find the story gets interesting after all! Which I thought it did, about 2 or 3 chapters in, and then I was tenterhooks until the middle -- but then, they go to the capital and they're mired in dishwater-dull politics and then tedious battle and ugh for nearly the rest of the book.
Anyway, back to your review, I didn't mind the romance, what tiny bits there were of it; tho I did think, while they were getting their sexy on pretty much solely from having worked magic together, that it would be more interesting to explore a magic world where you get that sexy on from the intimacy of creating magic together, but you don't necessarily act on it. Like if the wizard had said, Yeah, this is a thing that happens, don't let it bother you, it's just a by-product, nothing personal. But because they felt that spark, they had to act on it (eventually). This makes sense from the 17-yr-old pov, and maybe from the wizard too, since apparently he hadn't had any sexy feelings for like a hundred years and he's still a man after all, fuck it (literally).
The part that bugged me was the one sex scene RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE. I mean WTeverlastingjesusFUCK?!? They shoulda been dead asleep or FIGHTING THE BATTLE. Also, this was so stupid, we knew, they knew, everybody knew the magic they needed to work on the Big Bad, but they put it off and put it off until AFTER they let all these soldiers die (and our heroine angsting about it but not doing the magic we all knew she needed to be doing) and were so dead tired they couldn't work the spell and they had stopped to HAVE SEX INSTEAD? I mean, WHAT?!!?! Oh, and of course it was excellent mind-blowing sex, even tho, y'know, dead-tired battle-fatigue, so sexy that is.
On the magical world-building: I didn't mind that magic was built in any further into the socio-economic fabric - it seemed like major wizards were few and far between, and mostly under the king's control, and otherwise witches were like your basic local healing women. So not enought magic users to integrate - they were all segregated off or kinda under-the-radar standard wise women types.
And I wasn't too bothered by the loosey-gooseyness of the magic, the lack of rules around it and boundaries and such. Not in general. One thing is that if there's a lot of rules and what-not it stops being magic and becomes science and tech instead, essentially. Also one of Novik's points was that the dragon (wizard) was used to his particular style of magic, all written down and well-defined and everyone had practiced the same way for time out of mind, and you had to study up and read out of books - y'know, very male gate-keeping rigid linear thinking style. And so our heroine is all feminist earth-witch-intuitive magic wielding of a style all the Man establishment had been disregarding and pooh-poohing and calling old wives' tales.
But I didn't much care for how quickly she goes from no magic and magic-resenting to inventing her own stuff very powerful spur of the moment super easily. She should have had to earn that ease a little bit with practice and effort and mistakes along the way, and getting over herself, instead of switch a flip, and oh! this is so easy! But I suppose that's magic for you...
Other observations, I had worked out some theories about why the evil wood was so evil, why it was getting stronger, and I knew we would get an explanation, and it's not so bad a one, but a little disappointing. I mean, that's a fucking long time to carry a grudge - I suppose it just kept carrying itself.
I wanted more integration with the people who brought the magic, and then all up and died, but new people came in eventually, and the magic now in the wood, and this odd rootedness of the people living there now, who are excessively connected to the land. Where did that come from? It's never quite explained, tho I think there are two possible explanations, I suppose we can work out for ourselves.
Oh, and finally, I think the actual heroine of the book isn't our witch-narrator, but her best friend. She's the only real hero in the whole book, honestly.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-25 02:59 pm (UTC)You finally found the post you were looking for! :D
I honestly do not remember the heroine's best friend, which probably says everything it needs to about how much I recall of this book.
Age gaps by themselves don't bug me as much as the whole package deal of "teenage girl with no power paired with ancient super-powerful man". PLUS I don't like enemies-to-lovers*, and the trope generally does. Like Cordelia is significantly younger than Aral and significantly older than Jole, but neither relationship revolves around the younger person having zero authority or abilities, and they're CERTAINLY not adversarial.
*now, friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers, THAT'S fine, ofc
no subject
Date: 2022-06-25 03:44 pm (UTC)There really isn't any justifying the Jole thing. He's in this military-worshipping, authority-worshipping, Aral-worshipping, absolute authoritarian society, he's a lieutenant in his 20s and Aral's in his 60's, an admiral and Prime Minister. There's nothing about that that's OK, except Jole thinks so, and if we go with everyone gets to judge their own lives, OK, then we can go with Jole's fine with it. But from the outside it's much more likely that fine or not, Jole has minimal power in that situation. If he declines Aral's advances, he's absolutely entirely dependent on Aral not fuck him over, or sideline him. Which Aral wouldn't, we know, because he's got Integrity, but that's not situational, and it's the situation that's the problem. Not least because everything in that situation/society is going to tell Jole in his own head to be fine with it, whether he would have been otherwise or not. But that's pretty complicated, cuz Jole's whole nature is going to have been shaped by growing up in that society, so there's little use trying to detangle that mess.
In Uprooted Novik deals with the power thing by making it the young female protagonist who pushes for the sex and intimacy every time (and she's far from powerless once the sex thing starts - it's her very great power that makes her sexy at that point). The wizard constantly resists, until I was really unhappy with the actual sex scene. The girl does give the wizard one time to say no, when she's already a) in his room, b) in his bed, c) on top of him, d) woken him from sleep he desperately needs (and he needs her help to fight the army outside); all of which he explicitly did not consent to. So the last consent in my mind doesn't have a lot of meaning. If we give Jole the autonomy to say that he was happy with the Aral thing start to finish, we need to give the wizard the autonomy to say he doesn't want intimacy or sex with the girl, and not keep making him say no again and again til she wears him down for his own good. Ugh.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-25 05:02 pm (UTC)Fair enough!
I give Cordelia and Aral more slack because Cordelia is safe in Beta Colony when she makes the decision to rejoin Aral, with literally every pressure around her being "no don't".
Aral and Jole is indefensible, yep.
I have no interest in defending anything about Uprooted's romance, I hated the whole thing and barely remember it anyway. XD
no subject
Date: 2022-06-25 05:40 pm (UTC)The best part of the romance in Uprooted is that it is so minimal you can pretty much ignore it. Did you hate the rest of the story? I thought it had a lot of promise, I just had some quibbles with this and that.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-25 08:50 pm (UTC)Okay, fair, but the reasons she wasn't safe in Beta were definitely not "Aral is in a position of power over her in Beta Colony". XD And there was no need for her to go to Barrayar specifically just to escape Beta.
I do not remember Uprooted well, but IIRC I liked most of the rest of the book -- probably better than you did -- apart from the annoying romance. The annoying romance was kind of ignorable but it still tainted my perception of the book as a whole.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-26 05:26 am (UTC)Well, of course, not exactly, there was prolly something else going on, but I have a hard time imagining that LOTR and Ents and moving Wood things bringing down Sauron's tower weren't STRONG influences on Uprooted (the wizard lives in a tower (for fuck's sake) which the Wood Queen destroys. Twice.) Basically it's The Two Towers, Book III fanfic.
But what I wanted to add is that I recently learned that Tolkien got the whole Ent thing, and the marching forest that brings down Sauron's tower from... MacBeth! He was disappointed in Shakespeare (didn't like his plots - what? Who reads Shakespeare for the plots? Ofc his plots are awful!) and he was especially disappointed in how the tree-army was depicted in MacBeth. Thus, Ents. Much better. Long live disappointment in Shakespeare :-)
...but this makes Uprooted, among other things, ultimately MacBeth fanfic *g*
no subject
Date: 2022-06-26 02:11 pm (UTC)Omigosh, did you only just now find out about the MacBeth influence? That's where Tolkien got Eowyn killing the Nazgul king from too! Because "I was born by C-section" is an incredibly lame solution to the "No man of woman born shall harm MacBeth" prophecy when women are RIGHT THERE. XD
I kinda think there's another MacBeth reference in LoTR, too, but I can't remember what and Google is not producing it for me, so maybe not.