book review! Uprooted by Naomi Novik
Jan. 29th, 2019 07:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Oh so I read Naomi Novik's Uprooted yesterday because I had read the preview chapter on Libby and grudgingly placed a hold even though I wasn't sure about the process, and it came through ahead of schedule so I went ahead and borrowed it and then devoured it.
It was great, I recommend it. I read it with zero spoilers, not even knowing what it was about beyond a vague suspicion of "fairy tale", and it delivered on that for sure, but not in the expected ways. (I had a vague notion of Sleeping Beauty, kinda? and there was a dreaming queen in a thorny woods, but mostly the myths it was borrowing from were expressly stated as Polish ones, the heroine is directly out of a book the author had read to her as a child, and I am ashamed I can't spell her name but it was in first person so her name only appears a handful of times in the book!) (Also: to all of you who were like YOU CAN'T WRITE A BOOK IN FIRST PERSON NO ONE WILL READ IT well fuck you guys, if Astolat can do it well that's no guarantee anyone else can but. Whatever it was great.)
Anyway. Quite apart from anything else-- the storytelling is superb, it's very well-drawn, lots of vivid details and unexpected characterizations and actually not being able to easily categorize the various characters in their fairy tale arch-types gave a lot of suspense because you never knew who was deathproof and who was gonna get it, this was quite a violent story-- what I found most moving?
It was a super-vivid story about learning disabilities. A character is trying to learn to be a wizard and it was exactly like me doing math all through middle school on up through programming classes in college, I'd take the book and muster all the courage I had and try to hone my damaged attention as sharp as it would go, and focus it with all my desperation on this book, with its series of instructions, that was Supposed To Work, but it was always just dead paper in my hands that never made any sense and there I was following the completely-nonsensical steps to the absolute limit of possible precision and in the end I just had a big mess of smudged pencil graphite and a nonsense answer, and all the experts staring at me like I'm some kind of wilfully-obstinate freak doing this on purpose, and I'm shaking and trying not to cry and it makes no sense, and then I find the bit that my battered brain can actually get around (oh, say, trigonometry, after that hellish year of algebra) and suddenly it's alive and I can make it do whatever I want with fluent ease, and everyone else is like "ugh you moron what are you even-- oh that's the right answer, wait what?" and I'm like "but this makes sense! look! i can make it fly! you can extrapolate this infinitely!" and they're like--
only since this is a fantasy story, it works out, unlike how in real life that just meant they didn't give me partial credit for the algebra because clearly I was just doing this on purpose, and so I failed junior year math and didn't get into the college i wanted and have never had a job that paid much more than minimum wage and now I'm middle-aged and have never been able to really believe in myself and so on and so forth. Ha! Ha ha. Ha! (This isn't usually where book reviews go, whoops! Sorry some of us just aren't over 1996.)
Anyway. I recommend the book just for that, it was so fucking vivid, and then she makes a fucking earthquake at them, and that's so poorly told (i mean by me, just now, it's really good in the book) it's not really a spoiler, you'd have to read the book to know what I meant.
So, like. Do.
It was great, I recommend it. I read it with zero spoilers, not even knowing what it was about beyond a vague suspicion of "fairy tale", and it delivered on that for sure, but not in the expected ways. (I had a vague notion of Sleeping Beauty, kinda? and there was a dreaming queen in a thorny woods, but mostly the myths it was borrowing from were expressly stated as Polish ones, the heroine is directly out of a book the author had read to her as a child, and I am ashamed I can't spell her name but it was in first person so her name only appears a handful of times in the book!) (Also: to all of you who were like YOU CAN'T WRITE A BOOK IN FIRST PERSON NO ONE WILL READ IT well fuck you guys, if Astolat can do it well that's no guarantee anyone else can but. Whatever it was great.)
Anyway. Quite apart from anything else-- the storytelling is superb, it's very well-drawn, lots of vivid details and unexpected characterizations and actually not being able to easily categorize the various characters in their fairy tale arch-types gave a lot of suspense because you never knew who was deathproof and who was gonna get it, this was quite a violent story-- what I found most moving?
It was a super-vivid story about learning disabilities. A character is trying to learn to be a wizard and it was exactly like me doing math all through middle school on up through programming classes in college, I'd take the book and muster all the courage I had and try to hone my damaged attention as sharp as it would go, and focus it with all my desperation on this book, with its series of instructions, that was Supposed To Work, but it was always just dead paper in my hands that never made any sense and there I was following the completely-nonsensical steps to the absolute limit of possible precision and in the end I just had a big mess of smudged pencil graphite and a nonsense answer, and all the experts staring at me like I'm some kind of wilfully-obstinate freak doing this on purpose, and I'm shaking and trying not to cry and it makes no sense, and then I find the bit that my battered brain can actually get around (oh, say, trigonometry, after that hellish year of algebra) and suddenly it's alive and I can make it do whatever I want with fluent ease, and everyone else is like "ugh you moron what are you even-- oh that's the right answer, wait what?" and I'm like "but this makes sense! look! i can make it fly! you can extrapolate this infinitely!" and they're like--
only since this is a fantasy story, it works out, unlike how in real life that just meant they didn't give me partial credit for the algebra because clearly I was just doing this on purpose, and so I failed junior year math and didn't get into the college i wanted and have never had a job that paid much more than minimum wage and now I'm middle-aged and have never been able to really believe in myself and so on and so forth. Ha! Ha ha. Ha! (This isn't usually where book reviews go, whoops! Sorry some of us just aren't over 1996.)
Anyway. I recommend the book just for that, it was so fucking vivid, and then she makes a fucking earthquake at them, and that's so poorly told (i mean by me, just now, it's really good in the book) it's not really a spoiler, you'd have to read the book to know what I meant.
So, like. Do.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-29 01:53 pm (UTC)Her new one, SPINNING SILVER, is also pretty great.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-29 11:27 pm (UTC)My BFF is actually a math teacher and has promised, someday, to go over it with me. I have a feeling I'll just join in when her kids get to that age.
I'm... not in a hurry.
I knew I'd love her stuff, and I was trying not to get sucked in -- there's so much-- but it's futile, I think.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-30 09:59 pm (UTC)