Uprooted

This reminded me a bit of Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted, and I loved that so much. It felt like a piece of my childhood, grown up a bit and changed, but still with the same enchanting qualities mixed in. I really enjoyed this story and found myself wholly caught up in it. I loved Agnieszka and Sarkan, and Kasia too was a wonderful addition to the story. This book felt so much less traditional and predictable than anything I've read in a while. It felt like a fairytale, but with a modern twist that didn't make it black-and-white good and evil. There was tragedy throughout, on all sides, and I was surprised by the number of deaths throughout as well. But I loved how this story refused to let anyone be unimportant. At one point in the heat of battle, Agnieszka sees a boy on the other side who is her age, and she is deeply troubled. She thinks of how “they all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren't alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse... I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them – this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn't a whole man” (346). This is something I don't notice often in fantasies, or any novels involving wars and battles and such. We're never made to think about how each person matters, in fact, we forget that they matter at all. So I really loved how this book drew attention to that and constantly reminded us that everyone does count. It was really a wonderful novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.