Uprooted: A Novel

"Uprooted is based on Polish folklore. It’s sort of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ and it’s also sort of feeding the maiden sacrifice to the dragon… A lot of fairy tales bleed together and have elements of other things in them. In this one, the heroine is the sacrifice. She jumps in front of her friend who is supposed to be the one the dragon picks, and so he picks her – he says, sure, whatever, I don’t care. The dragon is a wizard. Every seven years he comes down and takes a girl from one of the villages in his land, and nobody knows what happens to her; she goes off, and she’s never seen it again, so people are assuming all kinds of horrible things. But it turns out all he wants is a housekeeper. He’s this surly, kind-of-traumatised magician, and he’s trying to keep an evil forest on the borders at bay. He’s fighting a holding action against it. Much of the book is the heroine coming into her own power, learning that she has her own magical talents. As she becomes more powerful, she has to go and save her friend, who has been taken by the forest. The forest itself is creepy and dark and wonderfully written. Probably the part I love most, as a gardener, is that there are giant stick insects in it, which is just awesome. Everybody goes for a praying mantis, nobody ever goes for stick insects. I loved that. That I couldn’t tell you, I’m not an expert on Polish folklore. But forests as dark, evil, scary places are a very common trope in folklore. At the time, they were full of wolves and bears and bandits, so they really were dangerous places. So it was often a contrast between the forest – which is scary and dangerous and untamed – and civilisation, the village, which is safe. We can certainly quibble over how safe civilisation is or how dangerous the forest is, but that was definitely the dichotomy. Look at ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ – the entire moral is: ‘Don’t go into the woods, kids.’ And also: ‘Don’t trust smooth-talking wolves’, I suppose…"

"Yes! I adore this book! A wizard known as the Dragon takes a girl once every ten years from the villages in a valley; in return, he protects the valley from the Wood, a forest that occasionally corrupts livestock or lost humans with violent madness, and is constantly trying to encroach on more territory. Our hero Agnieszka is an unlikely choice for the Dragon, so of course she is chosen. In his castle she discovers and begins to develop her magical talents. Thus far the book is folkloric and unsurprising, although beautifully told. But as the Wood steps up its strategies in this slow war, the story becomes incredibly gripping and strange. It is impossible to be quite sure who is in the grip of the Wood, and therefore who is safe to trust. The exact nature of the Wood itself is slowly, beautifully revealed. You read on because of genuine fear for everyone involved, and because of the beauty of the magic – the good magic and the evil – which is truly entrancing."