Uprooted Review

This week's novel is Uprooted by Naomi Novik.  It's my favorite so far of this year's books.

Agnieszka lives in a valley in the shadow of an ominous, corruptive wood, which is protected by The Dragon, a wizard who holds back the wood's spread and otherwise only shows up every ten years to take a village girl to be his servant.  When Agnieszka shows magic potential, he takes her and grumpily tries to teach her even though her special brand of magic drives him up a wall with its imprecise nature.  She's drawn into the war against the wood, rescuing the corrupted and burning trees mostly because it felt like the thing to do at the time.

One reason why I liked this one so much was because the beginning reminded me of Howl's Moving Castle, one of my favorite books of all time.  The Dragon is rude and doesn't feel the need to explain himself, and Agnieszka has more important things in her life than putting up with his attitude or bothering to learn all the complex, academic aspects of preforming magic.

Agnieszka and The Dragon's relationship at first has a huge power differential, which usually throws up all kinds of red flags for me.  He's the lord in charge of the valley, he's a mighty wizard, and he's her teacher.  But she quickly gives so few shits about any power he holds over her, that he gives up trying to tell her what to do.  He gets so frustrated trying to teach her that he gives up trying to instruct her and instead starts picking up techniques from her.  They end up coming to the relationship with a grudging respect for each other and mutual infuriation.  It's refreshing.

Also refreshing is how The Dragon is not romanticized.  Instead of descriptions of his good looks, we're treated to descriptions of how weird his face is.  Whenever he's not around and Agnieszka wishes he was, it's always because she thinks he could be useful.  I'm so used to stories where the male lead is broody, but mysterious like that's a good thing, and so handsome that it makes up for his attitude problems and borderline abusiveness.  Here, she has no delusions.  And just kinda likes him anyway once he calms down a bit.

In the second half, where Howl's Moving Castle took a turn for the zany like a wacky Shakespearian comedy, Uprooted introduces battle scenes against corrupted wood monsters with lots of blood and guts and magic cannonballs.  The story eases you into it with some minor skirmishes that grow more and more graphic over the course of the story until there are giant stick insects decapitating people.  Given the way this one starts, it's surprising how many people die.  But it works for me, because you're eased into it and the tone grows more and more tense between battles as well.

I also enjoyed the magic system here, specifically that there is a highly academic and precise way to use magic and then there is Agnieszka's home brew of "it just felt like that's what I should do."  It wasn't presented like she was a savant that didn't need to study, but it was more like she was one of those cooks that doesn't measure anything or a self taught musician who can't read sheet music.  This worked so well because the way the other magicians treated her in response felt honest.  They turned up their noses.  They were confused.  Even as they tried to work with her, they didn't get it.  This felt really relateable to me, both from the side of feeling inadequate or embarrassed to show that you have different methods than the accepted standard, and from the other side where even if you want to stay open minded, working with someone with methods out of left field can leave you uneasy because you don't trust it will hold up.

There's also a great relationship between Agnieszka and her best friend, Kasia.  It's a solid female friendship, and it's front and center in the story, spurring most of the plot and pushing the romance to the back seat.  What's great about it is that they both acknowledge that they hold some negative feelings toward each other, but instead of that demonizing them or setting them against each other, here they forgive each other, feel sorry for how they've hurt one another, and stick together.  It's so often the case in fiction that female friends are characterized as frenimies and they treat each other with catty disdain.  Here they were friends.

All in all, a quality book with healthy relationships and exciting magic action. 

The Aeronaut's Windlass Review

The book of the week--and I of course use the term loosely as this review is way overdue--is The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher.  Instead of reading this, you should read The Dresden Files, Butcher's earlier series.

In this steampunk novel, people live in spires and travel by airship.  When Spire Albion is invaded, a disgraced airship captain, a team of plucky guard recruits, a pair of whacky etherialists, and a sentient cat set out to put things right.

Usually, I finish a book and then think on it overnight to piece together how I felt about it and what I learned and what worked and what didn't.  With this book I didn't have to do that.  There was never a moment when I forgot I was reading, and the analysis stayed right at the surface the whole time.

"Oh, we're doing exposition now.  This is a weird spot for it.  It's slowing down the action."  

"Oh, we're doing this from this person's point of view?  But this person isn't doing the action, they're observing.  Why aren't we in this other person's head?  That seems like a much more exiting place to be."

Not so fun.

Now, it seems like Butcher's trying to do some interesting technical things here.

For instance, I've already mentioned the weird point of view choice.  There's a fight scene that takes place in the dark and we experience it from the point of view of a girl who ducks to the ground and can't see anything (as opposed to the guy who can see in the dark and does the attacking).  Therefore, the fight is described only through the sounds she hears.  That's pretty cool, and I've talked before about being true to your point of view character and cutting the reader off from the senses the character doesn't have.  The scene works to convey the character's disorientation.  However, I'd rather feel the thrill of the fight than feel disoriented.  This wouldn't be an issue if we stayed in that girl's head for the whole book, or if this was an isolated incident.  But it's not.  We seem to jump around to the least involved character in every situation.  It takes away from the immediacy, distancing the reader from the action.

Butcher commits to the point of view character even further by describing only settings and situations when the character experiences them for the first time.  If their environment is so commonplace as to not be worth mentioning, it doesn't get described.  This throws the reader into the world in media res.  The characters live in this world.  There's history and culture here.  However, it means the reader is left without an explaination.

For example, there is an airship in the first chapter, and the people who live aboard it know what it looks like and don't think to describe it.  This is fine because, with this genre, the general standard is that an airship is a naval ship that flies.  Okay.  Then, a third of the way through the book, a character sees this ship for the first time and there is a lengthy, detailed description.  There are a lot of things that are weird about this, mostly that it's so obvious.  When reading, I thought, "and here are a few paragraphs describing a ship we already know.  Hmmm."  1. If I hadn't come up with an image that matched this description, I would be forced either to change my perception of the ship after I've already gotten attached to my version for 1/3 of the book, or to reject this belated description.  2. Since the description turns out to be redundant, it wastes time and slows everything down. 3. The obviousness of this description makes it really clear that there hasn't been a description for things I don't have a good mental image of, which is a lot of things.

This world is entirely fabricated, complete with made up words and novel settings.  However, very little of the world building gets described because all the characters take it for granted.  I know a spire is a tall tower, but I don't know what this spire looks like or what it's made of, or how the different levels interact with one another.  My initial vision of a jagged, crystalline spike rising out of the mist turned out to be wrong when I'm told pretty far into the book that it's a perfect cylinder, and even later in the book when I'm told sunlight doesn't reach inside.  Then I have no idea what a habble is, even though the word is used constantly.  I got so frustrated with this that I googled it, thinking it was just a word I didn't know and everything would make sense once I learned.  But no.  Google brought me to the wiki page for this book. 

I've had a lot of conversations with other writers about when it's preferred not to describe something.  The reader's mental image of the main character is fine, maybe even preferred since they can project themselves more easily.  The reader doesn't need a description of a convenience store because they know what a convenience store looks like.  However, if the way the main character looks affects the plot or affects the way other characters interact with them, the reader needs to know what that is.  If the scene takes place in a gerflaful, the reader needs to know what that is.

It's such a shame, because there seems to be so much world building happening in this book, but it doesn't make the jump from the author's head to the page.  It's not conveyed effectively and I spent the book lost, at first waiting for an explanation to come, then distrusting that it would ever happen. 

I guess since the Dresden Files took place in Chicago, this wasn't an issue.  There were just other setting issues.

My friend Jim likes to talk about Butcher's "scenes and sequels" method of structuring stories.  You have a scene that advances the plot in some way.  Then you have the sequel to that scene where there is a reaction to the events, usually emotional.  It often ends up being a kind of debriefing.  It's a solid structure, but here, like everything else, it's so obvious.  There's an event, then they talk about it, then there's another event, and then they talk about it.  All the strings are visible.  And given the problems with point of view and being separated from the action, and the odd choice of when to drop exposition to make the scene by turns confusing and slow, the scene parts where the action is supposed to take place fail to get very exciting and the story was overwhelmed by discussion after discussion.

 ***

Next Week: YA fantasy.  Uprooted by Naomi Novick.