And yet, somehow, I managed to not get around to reading Naomi Novik's Uprooted until now, despite having checked it out from the library multiple times, and having one particular online friend bug me about needing to read it for most of this year, as well. I found a copy at a St. Vinnie's, though, so getting it more formally onto my shelf was maybe a better way to get it read.
The setting is somewhat unusual here in that, although we're in a fairy-tale setting, it's based more on Slavic lore than German or French, the way most of the best-known tales are. The land that things are happening in is Polnya, clearly inspired by Poland, with a vaguely-menacing foreign power called Rosya; a Venezia is mentioned as well, but only once and in passing. Names fit this setting, as well; the narrator, Agnieszka, is perhaps the most obvious instance of this, but every character has a certain eastern-European feel to their names, unless they're a mage going by the noun-based nomenclature they use for outsiders.
Around the edges of the setting, bordering both Polnya and Rosya, is The Wood. This is a vast, horribly corrupted forest, seemingly implacable and always trying to encroach deeper into human lands. Anything from within its reaches can only serve to spread the corruption further; at one point, the characters travel through a village that, within living memory, was outside the forest, but was overtaken in a single day. The Wood is also intelligent on its own, able to make decisions based on the effects that an action will have in the long-term, laying traps for those outside in an effort to destroy everything that holds it back.
Agnieszka lives in a valley that directly borders the Wood, where its encroachment is held back through the magics of the Dragon, the local mage-lord (not an actual dragon). He's a cold, unapproachable sort, actively avoiding any but the most necessary interactions with the villages under his protection. All he asks, beyond the annual taxes, is that every ten years, one girl from one of the villages be provided to him to be his live-in servant until the next Choosing. The girls he chooses always say that he never laid a hand on them, nothing of that sort, but they also invariably leave the valley entirely within a month of being released from service, and never come back.
The book opens with a Choosing; Agnieszka (and indeed her whole village) are utterly convinced that the Dragon will be choosing her friend Kasia, who has all the best qualities (beauty, grace, stalwart bravery)... but Agnieszka doesn't know that she carries the gift of magic in her, and so she has to be trained, and thus she ends up chosen instead. The first part of the book deals with Agnieszka being seemingly unable to actually get the hang of magic at all; it's not until she's forced into action by having to fend off an attack on her home village while the Dragon is away dealing with a different attack by the Wood that she's able to really start showing her abilities; while the Dragon (and indeed most witches and wizards in-setting) relies on a very rigid, almost scientific understanding of how magic works, Agnieszka's gift instead acts in a more artistic way, with her abilities being based less on the rules and more on what feels right. Art instead of science, as it were. This shows itself most clearly when she's able to use the spellbook of Jaga (that J makes a Y sound), a long-dead witch who was known for doing things mages oughtn't be able to do and having spellbooks that are utterly useless... at least, until Agnieszka gets her hands on one.
If this was a Harry Potter book, the entire novel would be about Agnieszka's training. Instead, it quickly changes to instead be about the ongoing battle that she and the Dragon wage against the Wood, as it plots to bring down the human kingdoms entirely. This begins with Kasia being kidnapped by one of the Wood's creatures and corrupted, but quickly becomes something far more wide-spread when word of Kasia's rescue reaches the palace and the ear of Prince Marek, second in line to the throne and absolutely certain that where one person could be rescued, the queen (who was taken twenty years prior) surely can be as well. This goes... rather disastrously; the second half of the book deals largely with the aftermath of the 'rescue', along with delving into exactly what the Wood's true nature is.
Unfortunately, it's hard to get a good read on exactly what's going on in most characters' heads. We spend a lot of time with Agnieszka and Kasia, but while the rest of the cast is largely understandable in broad strokes, it's difficult to get a good idea of why they act the way they do. Even when the reason for the Dragon's aloofness in regards to the lands he watches over becomes clear, it offers little in the way of background for him; he's still a cipher, just one with some explanation for why he acts the way he does in this one specific area.
If there's one thing that disappointed me, really, it's that despite Jaga being mentioned as having appeared at a prince's christening long after she had died (and apparently commenting that she was in the wrong time period before vanishing abruptly), she never actually figures into the narrative beyond her spellbook in the Dragon's library and the way that her existence as a liminal figure among mages leaves her as more of a creature of folklore than an actual person, with one wizard outright telling Agnieszka that Jaga is just a fairy tale. Baba Yaga is one of those characters who really fascinates me, where you're never quite sure going into a story that she appears in whether she'll be good or bad for the other characters, and I think it would have been interesting to see her appear, though at the same time, even invoking her throws a lot of the rules into question. You just don't know what's going to happen, any more than Agnieszka knows what's necessarily going to happen when she starts a spell. She actively works magic that she's been told is impossible, several times; over and over, she exceeds everyone's expectations.
I think I'm going to have to keep an eye out for Novik's other books, now.
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