This and the NYT review below I found after reading the book (ebook from the public library), a good read for a quiet Saturday.
Naomi Novik skillfully takes the fairy-tale-turned-bildungsroman structure of her premise — the peasant girl selected to serve the terrifying magician, her undiscovered magical talent, an evil wood encroaching on the doorstep — and builds enough flesh on those bones to make a very different animal. Plain but hyper-talented Agnieszka could risk cliché, but even without Novik’s tweaks to the formula, she makes for a gripping narrator, pragmatically personable but tapped into the lyric. The vivid characters around her also echo their fairy-tale forebears, but are grounded in real-world ambivalence that makes this book feel quietly mature, its world lived-in. Even the magic has the low-key, organic feel that you would expect from a farming valley. When the sinister wood infects some cattle, for instance, their owner doesn’t immediately slaughter them — his family has no other animals, and he’s so desperate he delays what’s necessary. Even in the midst of chaos, the villagers don’t vilify him for it. This is a book in which the thinnest threads of understanding can hold the whole enterprise aloft. None of these asides feel burdensome; the plot thickens as quickly as the thorn bushes of the wood cast shadows, and Agnieszka’s brisk narration and shrewd, shorthand observations of character make “Uprooted” a very enjoyable fantasy with the air of a modern classic.
