Uprooted.

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2015, inverts the usual formula for the “chosen one” story about a child who turns out to play an extremely important role in a history-changing event, and whose powers are critical in the way that event unfolds. The protagonist here, Agnieszka, isn’t even the one her village believes is going to be chosen by the local wizard, called the Dragon to serve as his apprentice, and she’s hardly the sort of student the Dragon was hoping for, but her presence there sets off a broad, violent conflict that will determine whether their society can survive or will be overrun by the sentient forces of the Wood. It’s smart and vaguely subversive of the traditions of this trope, although it becomes unspeakably violent in the resolution in ways I found hard to stomach.

Agnieszka lives in a small village near a dangerous forest called the Wood that acts with malevolence, corrupting anyone who enters it or eats its fruits or leaves and causing them to commit violence against anyone around them, like automatons under the Wood’s command. She’s chosen to become the next apprentice to the Dragon, the wizard for this particular part of the kingdom, a stern, cold man who takes a young girl under his tutelage every ten years or so – but after they leave his service, they never return to their original villages. Once Agnieszka gets to the Dragon’s tower, however, one of her friends from her village ends up corrupted by the Wood, which would normally require her execution to protect the rest of the valley, but Agnieszka finds a spell that might remove the corruption from her friend. That in turn attracts the attention of the crown prince, whose mother disappeared into the Wood many years before, and who demands that the Dragon and Agnieszka come with him into the forest to find and rescue the Queen.

Much of what Agnieszka does – or what happens to her – is a combination of circumstance and her own tenacity, making her an interesting lead character but not a terribly complex one. She’s driven by a simple sense of right and wrong that is fundamentally humanist; she refuses to sacrifice a single life, ever, even if it has the potential to save many other lives down the road. Some of this is wisdom, as she realizes the path of killing everyone corrupted by the Wood has no end to it, as it doesn’t stop whatever force underlies the Wood’s endless thirst for territory, but Novik defines Agnieszka more by the high value she places on an individual life. Again, it makes her interesting, but not very deep.

The Wood ends up the more intriguing character, so to speak, although I got a bit lost in the explanations of what exactly is behind the Wood’s sentience and its Anton Chigurh-like drive to kill anything in its path without regard for anything about the victims. It’s a better exercise in world-building than character development, saved by the fact it’s well-written and mostly well-paced.

The body count in Uprooted is enormous, enough to make George R.R. Martin jealous; it’s most likely a comment on the futility of war of any sort, but Novik’s tone towards the massive losses of soldiers in the last two conflicts borders on the callous, and it’s out of sync with Agnieszka’s almost single-minded focus on saving any individual life she can. This was ultimately what turned me against Uprooted, even though I enjoyed most of the read; it just devolves into pointless violence, with one scene that recalled the trench warfare of World War I, and there’s no real point to any of it. Characters climb over piles of dead bodies to continue the fighting, and often don’t even understand why they’re doing so. It’s just too far removed from what powered the first three-fourths of the book. I wouldn’t recommend against Uprooted, but in the end it just didn’t get over the line for me.

Next up: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.