Uprooted

Review by New York Times Review

OFTEN, READING a book that calls to mind your teenage favorites is, at best, an exercise in nostalgia: a slightly uncomfortable reminder of a time when coming-of-age tales seemed to offer magnificent maps of the possible. But under those bright, forthright tales with the air of the mythic about them, you could sometimes find a messier story (courtesy of Angela Carter or Tanith Lee, say) that struck deeper, a story that knew you had already seen the outline of the dark and understood that no easy map was going to work. Enter UPROOTED (Del Rey, $25), in which 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. FOR SOME AUTHORS, a collection of early work might carry an air of formality, like a curated museum exhibit of their careers. But that was never Terry Pratchett's style. It will come as no surprise to those familiar with Sir Terry's work that his annotated juvenilia, collected alongside more recent short fiction in A BLINK OF THE SCREEN (Doubleday $26.95), read decidedly more as if you're sitting in the author's parlor on a lazy afternoon, flipping through an album while he weighs in on - and occasionally condemns - those long-ago stories. "My word, how this brings back memories," he says of one of them; he introduces another with little more than "I'm quite glad I never tried to sell this one." Though Pratchett's tongue stays firmly in his cheek, that's not entirely self-deprecation; many of these stories are by their nature slight, and serve more as markers than as works in themselves. For every interesting foray into hard science fiction, there's a formulaic comedy about the author whose character comes to life, or a brief, surreal thought experiment about what it must be like to be trapped inside a Victorian Christmas card. Some are darker than one might imagine from the man whose Discworld seems like such fun, though readers who have kept up with those novels will recognize many of these early exercises of Pratchett's satirical eye. And if it's Discworld you've come for, "A Blink of the Screen" has some charmers, gathering a brief but enlightening collection of short stories and ephemera from fairly far afield - including a "national anthem" written for BBC Radio, a reminder of Pratchett's breadth of pop-culture influence. (Similarly, one of the non-Discworld pieces comes from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.) The Discworld stories, unsurprisingly, are the collection's gems. In particular, an outtake from "The Sea and Little Fishes," which centers on Pratchett's hall-of-fame combination of Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, bureaucracy and magic, feels like a familiar page in the album full of beloved faces. Pratchett died in March after a long illness, leaving this collection as something of a farewell present to his fans; it's a book meant to be cherished by those who want a glimpse of both the work and the man. THE SELF-AWARE AUTOMATON is far from new territory - the theme has been examined by everyone from Isaac Asimov, in "I, Robot," to Ekaterina Sedia, in "The Alchemy of Stone." Now Ian Tregillis joins in with THE MECHANICAL (Orbit, paper, $17). This novel makes no bones about what it is: From the moment the automaton Jax observes his Dutch masters executing a fellow "Clakker" who achieved free will, the narrative is designed to be a thriller that concerns itself at every turn with what it means to be human. (In between chase scenes, characters debate at length the theological basis for the soul.) It's perhaps a fitting irony, then, that this alternatehistory fantasy sometimes feels less like a compellingly human story than a collection of carefully rendered attributes painstakingly assembled by machine. Tregillis's plot moves briskly across two continents and several points of view, and the calamities build in ways that can be just as unsettling as intended. But as one might expect from a narrative that so closely engages with slavery, occasionally the story bends under the weight of its own extended metaphor. Still, it's a story without easy answers, and one that's too big for a single book to contain; "The Mechanical" is the first of a series, as genre-savvy readers will guess when they're rounding third base without any sign of tidy plot resolutions. Even if the spark of life never quite ignites, however, this secondary-world series should offer a promising introduction to new fans; it's both high concept and built down to the smallest details, with alchemy and espionage to spare. IT'S ALWAYS INTERESTING when artists "emerge" in the American sphere after establishing a legacy in their home countries. The brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky were fixtures of Soviet-Russian science fiction; their work has been turned into movies, referred to by a new generation of speculative writers and rereleased, minus the censors, in the post-Soviet era. THE DEAD MOUNTAINEER'S INN (Melville House, paper, $17) is already considered one of their classics, having been adapted for film and as a video game, but this handsome edition arrives with Neversink Library's Wes Anderson-minimalist cover aesthetic and an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer to entice those unfamiliar with the Strugatskys. This dual existence - famous, yet undiscovered - seems to suit "The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" down to the ground. On the surface, it's a locked-chalet mystery in which the irascible Inspector Glebsky has his vacation interrupted by a cadre of the usual suspects: a blowhard millionaire, an androgynous teenager, a busybody innkeeper, an eccentric physicist, an incurable grump, a femme banal. In short order, the book seals its genre trappings with an avalanche and a corpse. It's the investigation of a lifetime, hampered only by the fact that Glebsky wants nothing to do with it. (He's a narrator fallible enough to fall into traps, and just mature enough to know better.) As translated by Josh Billings, the Strugatsky brothers' rhythms set staccato conversation alongside passages unsettling in their languid cadence; there's enough dry humor to spark kindling, underlaid with a seeping dread that lingers long after the mystery is solved. That delicious sense of the uncanny is the unseen guest in every room of this inn, and when the tale slips from a riff on Agatha Christie into something more like "War of the Worlds," it's with less surprise than relief that Glebsky is made to realize the universe is stranger than it seems. That the difference feels so slight is part of what makes "The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" delightful and melancholy by turns, and so satisfying to read. NEDI OKORAFOR HAS made a name for herself with novels that combine politically complex science fiction and lyrical fantasy. The worlds her characters inhabit are as messy as they are magical, the conflicts as pointed as the magic is mythical. The World Fantasy Award-winning "Who Fears Death" followed Onyesonwu, a mixed-race child of rape born amid genocide, and was an unblinking look at an upturned future that asked hard questions about the present. THE book of phoenix (DAW, $24.95), its indirect prequel, is less concerned with the immediate world of "Who Fears Death" than with how such worlds come to be in the first place. And Okorafor runs roughshod over every genre marker she can find on her way there, despite (or perhaps because of) doom as the inevitable endpoint. Phoenix is a superhuman being, held at a Big Eye facility in New York; in quick succession, she falls in love, recognizes the harmful experiments being carried out on her and makes a dramatic escape. Her inescapable existence as an overtly colonized body provides more than impetus for revenge; it's the jumping-off point for a book particularly interested in the ways globalism reinforces colonialism, the ways one can carve a life out of so unfair a world, and how even superpowers have their limits when pitted against human cruelty. Some parallels are subtler than others (the book contains asides pinned directly to the Middle Passage, Henrietta Lacks and Okorafor's own previous work), and some of the questions it raises go deliberately unanswered, but it's refreshingly direct in the ways it contrasts its everyday politics with its everyday magic. Despite some loose threads, Okorafor triumphs over the perils of the prequel by making the inevitable feel newly dreadful. Blending poetic passages with sharp observation and the occasional cadence of a story told by firelight, "The Book of Phoenix" is an assured introduction not just to her world's myths, but to the process of mythmaking. ANYONE ATTEMPTING TO encapsulate the Inklings - that club of devout writers and academics who occupied the Oxbridge academic stratosphere of England before and after World War II - has some challenges to overcome. At the height of participation, their members numbered in the dozens (all men, naturally, though Dorothy L. Sayers gets singled out among the almost-rans), and their careers followed vastly different paths, nearly all of which were overshadowed by the encompassing fame of C. S. Lewis. But in THE FELLOWSHIP: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35), the husband-and-wife team of Philip and Carol Zaleski bring to bear both extensive scholarship and a neatly interwoven narrative; this is a story about storytellers, and it shows. While Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien take up the lion's share of the accomplishments, perhaps by default, the authors make good use of Charles Williams and Owen Barfield as barometers of the Inklings as a whole, as well as foils for Tolkien's quiet imaginings and Lewis's often-bombastic treatises. (Barfield's travails, with decades shackled to an office job and striving to recapture youthful success, come across as particularly poignant opposite Lewis's rising star.) Occasionally, some tidbits of trivia can feel as if they were included less out of direct narrative merit than out of a desire to justify the sheer effort expended to gather them - this is a book that features almost 100 pages of endnotes and bibliography - but for all that, things move nimbly across a century of deep shifts in England's political, religious and literary history. In all biographies, it's a trick to make the subjects seem interesting enough for a book while maintaining enough critical distance to acknowledge their flaws along with their virtues. In "The Fellowship," the authors never cease to feel for the Inklings, particularly sympathizing with their yearnings for spiritual and professional fulfillment, with occasional wry asides on the nature of their marriages and their politics to take note of shortcomings both personal and institutional. Taken together, it makes the overarching life of the group something greater than the sum of its parts. GENEVIEVE VALENTINE'S third novel, "Persona," was published in March. She is also the writer of DC Comics' "Catwoman."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 31, 2015]

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Review by Booklist Review

Novik (Blood of Tyrants, 2013) swaps the fire-breathing dragons of her Temeraire series for a dragon of another sort in her newest fantasy. In the village of Dvernik, the powerful wizard Sarkan (the Dragon) keeps the nearby Wood's dark forces at bay. As payment, he takes a 17-year-old village girl to be his servant every 10 years, which is how dirt-smudged Agnieszka ends up locked in his tower. Though she loses her freedom, she also discovers she is a witch. Her magic lessons with Sarkan are soon interrupted as the Wood begins encroaching on villages, spreading illness and death. Throwing caution to the wind, Agnieszka takes on its horrors, aided by Sarkan, but are they strong enough to defeat such deeply rooted corruption? Novik's atmospheric tale blends folklore, magic, danger, and a pinch of romance into an enthralling narrative; however, it is the headstrong Agnieszka who drives the story. Readers will not falter in their devotion to this inspiring, yet down-to-earth heroine as she takes enormous risks and carves her own place in the world.--Smith, Julia Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this breathtaking departure from her Temeraire alternate history series, Novik drops readers into an instantly immersive Polish fairy tale. The so-called Dragon is actually a man-a wizard who takes young women from a rural village as payment for protecting the region from the poisonous influence of the evil Wood. When Agnieszka is chosen to serve the Dragon for 10 years, she finds within herself a rare and incredible talent for magic. She is disaster prone and homesick, but nonetheless steps up to the role of heroine when the situation demands it. Soon, Agnieszka's fabulous journey expands to encompass a deadly quest, the terrible glamor of a royal court, a true and unbreakable friendship, and just a touch of romance. Novik's use of language is supremely skillful as she weaves a tale that is both elegantly grand and earthily humble, familiar as a Grimm fairy tale yet fresh, original, and totally irresistible. This will be a must-read for fantasy fans for years to come. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Aside from her propensity for getting dirty, there is nothing obviously remarkable about Agnieszka, so no one is more surprised than she when it is Agnieszka, not her beautiful and accomplished friend Kasia, who is selected by the local wizard. Rumors abound about the Dragon, and although the villagers don't know why the he chooses one of their 17-year-old girls every ten years, they're sure it's not for anything proper. Agnieszka's timid presence in the Dragon's castle and attempts to learn magic are by turns cringe-worthy, hilarious, and touching. Although the premise of the seemingly ordinary protagonist who is really a formidable magician is quite familiar, Novik's modern fairy tale is much more than a coming-of-age novel; its richly imagined world, unflinching look at human nature, and underlying thread of humor make for a wholly compelling listening experience. Julia Emelin's expressive voice and multiaccented narration perfectly capture the novel's large cast of characters and Eastern European setting. VERDICT Highly recommended. ["This exceptional fantasy for adult and teen readers should appeal to those who love fairy tale-influenced stories": LJ 4/15/15 starred review of the Del Rey: Ballantine hc.]-Nicole Williams, Sharjah Inst. of Applied Technology, United Arab Emirates © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Rumors abound about the Dragon, and although the villagers don't know why he chooses one of their 17-year-old girls every 10 years, they're sure it's not for anything proper. Agnieszka's timid presence in the Dragon's castle and attempts to learn magic are by turns cringe-worthy, hilarious, and touching. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Chapter 1 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 were 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. He doesn't devour them really; it only feels that way. He takes a girl to his tower, and ten years later he lets her go, but by then she's someone different. Her clothes are too fine and she talks like a courtier and she's been living alone with a man for ten years, so of course she's ruined, even though the girls all say he never puts a hand on them. What else could they say? And that's not the worst of it--­after all, the Dragon gives them a purse full of silver for their dowry when he lets them go, so anyone would be happy to marry them, ruined or not. But they don't want to marry anyone. They don't want to stay at all. "They forget how to live here," my father said to me once, unexpectedly. I was riding next to him on the seat of the big empty wagon, on our way home after delivering the week's firewood. We lived in Dvernik, which wasn't the biggest village in the valley or the smallest, or the one nearest the Wood: we were seven miles away. The road took us up over a big hill, though, and at the top on a clear day you could see along the river all the way to the pale grey strip of burned earth at the leading edge, and the solid dark wall of trees beyond. The Dragon's tower was a long way in the other direction, a piece of white chalk stuck in the base of the western mountains. I was still very small--­not more than five, I think. But I already knew that we didn't talk about the Dragon, or the girls he took, so it stuck in my head when my father broke the rule. "They remember to be afraid," my father said. That was all. Then he clucked to the horses and they pulled on, down the hill and back into the trees. It didn't make much sense to me. We were all afraid of the Wood. But our valley was home. How could you leave your home? And yet the girls never came back to stay. The Dragon let them out of the tower, and they came back to their families for a little while--­for a week, or sometimes a month, never much more. Then they took their dowry-­silver and left. Mostly they would go to Kralia and go to the University. Often as not they married some city man, and otherwise they became scholars or shopkeepers, although some people did whisper about Jadwiga Bach, who'd been taken sixty years ago, that she became a courtesan and the mistress of a baron and a duke. But by the time I was born, she was just a rich old woman who sent splendid presents to all her grand-­nieces and nephews, and never came for a visit. So that's hardly like handing your daughter over to be eaten, but it's not a happy thing, either. There aren't so many villages in the valley that the chances are very low--­he takes only a girl of seventeen, born between one October and the next. There were eleven girls to choose from in my year, and that's worse odds than dice. Everyone says you love a Dragon-­born girl differently as she gets older; you can't help it, knowing you so easily might lose her. But it wasn't like that for me, for my parents. By the time I was old enough to understand that I might be taken, we all knew he would take Kasia. Only travelers passing through, who didn't know, ever complimented Kasia's parents or told them how beautiful their daughter was, or how clever, or how nice. The Dragon didn't always take the prettiest girl, but he always took the most special one, somehow: if there was one girl who was far and away the prettiest, or the most bright, or the best dancer, or especially kind, somehow he always picked her out, even though he scarcely exchanged a word with the girls before he made his choice. And Kasia was all those things. She had thick wheat-­golden hair that she kept in a braid to her waist, and her eyes were warm brown, and her laugh was like a song that made you want to sing it. She thought of all the best games, and could make up stories and new dances out of her head; she could cook fit for a feast, and when she spun the wool from her father's sheep, the thread came off the wheel smooth and even without a single knot or snarl. I know I'm making her sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-­girl or the river-­maiden, in my head I imagined them all a little like Kasia; that was how I thought of her. And I wasn't old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon. She didn't mind it, she said. She was fearless, too: her mother Wensa saw to that. "She'll have to be brave," I remember hearing her say to my mother once, while she prodded Kasia to climb a tree she'd hung back from, and my mother hugging her, with tears. We lived only three houses from one another, and I didn't have a sister of my own, only three brothers much older than me. Kasia was my dearest. We played together from our cradles, first in our mothers' kitchens keeping out from underfoot and then in the streets before our houses, until we were old enough to go running wild in the woods. I never wanted to be anywhere inside when we could be running hand-­in-­hand beneath the branches. I imagined the trees bending their arms down to shelter us. I didn't know how I would bear it, when the Dragon took her. My parents wouldn't have feared for me, very much, even if there hadn't been Kasia. At seventeen I was still a too-­skinny colt of a girl with big feet and tangled dirt-­brown hair, and my only gift, if you could call it that, was I would tear or stain or lose anything put on me between the hours of one day. My mother despaired of me by the time I was twelve and let me run around in castoffs from my older brothers, except for feast days, when I was obliged to change only twenty minutes before we left the house, and then sit on the bench before our door until we walked to church. It was still even odds whether I'd make it to the village green without catching on some branch, or spattering myself with mud. "You'll have to marry a tailor, my little Agnieszka," my father would say, laughing, when he came home from the forest at night and I went running to meet him, grubby-­faced, with at least one hole about me, and no kerchief. He swung me up anyway and kissed me; my mother only sighed a little: what parent could really be sorry, to have a few faults in a Dragon-­born girl? Our last summer before the taking was long and warm and full of tears. Kasia didn't weep, but I did. We'd linger out late in the woods, stretching each golden day as long as it would go, and then I would come home hungry and tired and go straight to lie down in the dark. My mother would come in and stroke my head, singing softly while I cried myself to sleep, and leave a plate of food by my bed for when I woke up in the middle of the night with hunger. She didn't try to comfort me otherwise: how could she? We both knew that no matter how much she loved Kasia, and Kasia's mother Wensa, she couldn't help but have a small glad knot in her belly--­not my daughter, not my only one. And of course, I wouldn't really have wanted her to feel any other way. It was just me and Kasia together, nearly all that summer. It had been that way for a long time. We'd run with the crowd of village children when we were young, but as we got older, and Kasia more beautiful, her mother had said to her, "It's best if you don't see much of the boys, for you and them." But I clung to her, and my mother did love Kasia and Wensa enough not to try and pry me loose, even though she knew that it would hurt me more in the end. On the last day, I found us a clearing in the woods where the trees still had their leaves, golden and flame-­red rustling all above us, with ripe chestnuts all over the ground. We made a little fire out of twigs and dry leaves to roast a handful. Tomorrow was the first of October, and the great feast would be held to show honor to our patron and lord. Tomorrow, the Dragon would come. "It would be nice to be a troubadour," Kasia said, lying on her back with her eyes closed. She hummed a little: a traveling singer had come for the festival, and he'd been practicing his songs on the green that morning. The tribute wagons had been arriving all week. "To go all over Polnya, and sing for the king." She said it thoughtfully, not like a child spinning clouds; she said it like someone really thinking about leaving the valley, going away forever. I put my hand out and gripped hers. "And you'd come home every Midwinter," I said, "and sing us all the songs you'd learned." We held on tight, and I didn't let myself remember that the girls the Dragon took never wanted to come back. Of course at that moment I only hated him ferociously. But he wasn't a bad lord. On the other side of the northern mountains, the Baron of the Yellow Marshes kept an army of five thousand men to take to Polnya's wars, and a castle with four towers, and a wife who wore jewels the color of blood and a white fox-­fur cloak, all on a domain no richer than our valley. The men had to give one day a week of work to the baron's fields, which were the best land, and he'd take likely sons for his army, and with all the soldiers wandering around, girls had to stay indoors and in company once they got to be women. And even he wasn't a bad lord. The Dragon only had his one tower, and not a single man-­at-­arms, or even a servant, besides the one girl he took. He didn't have to keep an army: the service he owed the king was his own labor, his magic. He had to go to court sometimes, to renew his oath of loyalty, and I suppose the king could have called him to war, but for the most part his duty was to stay here and watch the Wood, and protect the kingdom from its malice. His only extravagance was books. We were well read by the standards of villagers, because he would pay gold for a single great tome, and so the book-­peddlers came all this way, even though our valley was at the very edge of Polnya. And as long as they were coming, they filled up the saddlebags of their mules with whatever worn-­out or cheaper stock of books they had and sold them to us for our pennies. It was a poor house in the valley that didn't have at least two or three books proudly displayed upon the walls. These might all seem like small and petty things, little enough cause to give up a daughter, to anyone who didn't live near enough the Wood to understand. But I had lived through the Green Summer, when a hot wind carried pollen from the Wood west a long way into the valley, into our fields and gardens. The crops grew furiously lush, but also strange and misshapen. Anyone who ate of them grew sick with anger, struck at their families, and in the end ran into the Wood and vanished, if they weren't tied down. I was six years old at the time. My parents tried to shelter me as much as they could, but even so I remembered vividly the cold clammy sense of dread everywhere, everyone afraid, and the never-­ending bite of hunger in my belly. We had eaten through all our last year's stores by then, counting on the spring. One of our neighbors ate a few green beans, driven foolish by hunger. I remember the screams from his house that night, and peering out the window to see my father running to help, taking the pitchfork from where it leaned against our barn. One day that summer, too young to understand the danger properly, I escaped my tired, thin mother's watch and ran into the forest. I found a half-­dead bramble, in a nook sheltered from the wind. I pushed through the hard dead branches to the protected heart and dug out a miraculous handful of blackberries, not misshapen at all, whole and juicy and perfect. Every one was a burst of joy in my mouth. I ate two handfuls and filled my skirt; I hurried home with them soaking purple stains through my dress and my mother wept with horror when she saw my smeared face. I didn't sicken: the bramble had somehow escaped the Wood's curse, and the blackberries were good. But her tears frightened me badly; I shied from blackberries for years after. The Dragon had been called to court that year. He came back early and rode straight to the fields and called down magic fire to burn all that tainted harvest, every poisoned crop. That much was his duty, but afterwards he went to every house where anyone had sickened, and he gave them a taste of a magic cordial that cleared their minds. He gave orders that the villages farther west, which had escaped the blight, should share their harvest with us, and he even gave up his own tribute that year entirely so none of us would starve. The next spring, just before the planting season, he went through the fields again to burn out the few corrupted remnants before they could take fresh root. Excerpted from Uprooted by Naomi Novik All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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