"I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn't care. I didn't feel I owed him beauty."

    Ever since I read Arden's Winternight Trilogy last year, I felt a craving for more stories like it. Stories with the similar setting and feel, but not copies or imitations. I'm usually not one for fantasy - well, too heavy fantasy, with magical systems and whole worlds that you have to understand. Gets too complicated. But this is the perfect middle: it's a real world setting, though reimagined, sometime a long time ago and there's magic. Perfection. And then I finally started reading Uprooted.

"I'd never thought of magic, of my magic, as good for anything, until I stood there and knew that there was no one else but me; that whatever was in me, however poor and clumsy and untaught, was more magic than anyone else in my village had. That they needed help, and I was the only one left who could give it."

    Agnieszka lives in a small village Dvernik, close to the malicious Wood from which the Dragon protects them. He is their wizard, and once every ten years he takes a girl from the village. Because of this, and because he never came among them, never attended feasts, the people didn't know him and thus they didn't love him, even though he saves their lives on a regular basis. After a decade with the Dragon they come back changed, no longer belonging and soon they leave Dvernik behind for the capital where they go to university. Also, their reputations are no longer pristine because they have spent a decade living with a man though they swear her has never touched any of them.

    He takes girls of seventeen, born between one October and the next. Those girls are known as Dragon-born and they are the ones people love differently. Families are to scared to get too attached to them lest they be chosen and thus lost to them forever. But Agnieszka is not worried about being chosen for everyone knows it will be her beautiful friend Kasia the Dragon will take. Agnieszka is the opposite of the graceful Kasia: coltish, skinny, always dirty and ripped; yet her parents loved all these faults because they were certain it meant she wouldn't the picked.

    Yet, on October 1, on the feast held in his honor, it is Agnieszka the Dragon chooses. Nieszka who knows nothing of housework and who, unlike Kasia, has not been preparing for this her whole life. Before anyone has time to react, the Dragon takes Nieszka's hand and disappears from the village, suddenly appearing in his tower. And thus her training begins - because that's what the Dragon does with his girls, he trains them in magic, to be witches.

    Nieszka doesn't have much success at the beginning. Or well, at all. The spells the Dragon teaches her only exhaust her and it takes her many tries to get anything accomplished. In the beginning she'd go back to sleep after performing her morning spells, because it tired her so, but over time she got stronger. She also tries to cook, and keep herself clean - all these have to be fixed with magic, accompanied by the Dragon's derisive comments. But when she finds Yaga's old spellboook, with spells that haven't worked in a long time, things start to click for her, her magic becomes instinctive and it now her instructor who is at a disadvantage because he cannot really help her.

    One day, prince Marek comes to visit, looking for magic from the Dragon. His mother, Queen Hannah, has run away with the Rosyan prince when he was a little boy and has been trapped inside the Wood for twenty years. As his father plans to remarry, Marek wants to free his mother to prevent it. The Dragon is firm in his refusal, saying it is impossible to free someone, especially after so long. That night, Nieszka has an unpleasant incident with the prince (aka he tries to rape her) and this ends in the Dragon having to alter his memory to spare the his wrath and retribution.

    A few days after, Kasia's mother comes to the tower to tell them the Wood has taken her daughter. The Dragon is sympathetic but tells her that Kasia is lost and there is nothing that can be done. Not ready to just give up on her friend, armed with courage and the little bit of magic she has learned, Agnieszka goes to the Wood and somehow, through sheer luck, she manages to get Kasia out of the tree in whose trunk she was trapped. This comes with repercussions though - Kasia is now wooden, her gain is off and she feels no pain, cannot be hurt easily. And Prince Marek hears of it. He comes to the tower with the capital's wizard, the Falcon, to see whether Kasia can be permitted to live, but also to insist on freeing his mother. And this dangerous excursion will be one of the gravest mistakes. 

    What I loved most about this story is that its protagonist isn't the most beautiful or the most capable woman in her surroundings. She's described and tall and gangly and always dirty. Her magic does not come easy and she barely passed her tests, sometimes through sheer luck. Yet it is her courage and determination, her unapologetically being herself that sets her apart. She perseveres and she loves fiercely and she doesn't give up. I absolutely loved this novel and am definitely going to read more by Novik.