Recommendations
Books Like Uprooted
A girl taken to serve a cold wizard — and a corrupted forest that has been eating the valley for generations
Naomi Novik's Uprooted begins with a choice: every ten years, the Dragon (a powerful, cold, reclusive wizard who lives in a tower) takes one girl from the valley he protects to serve him. Agnieszka knows it will be her best friend Kasia — beautiful and capable, obviously the kind of girl the Dragon would choose. It isn't Kasia. The novel is a dark fairy tale in the Polish tradition, and Agnieszka's relationship to magic — personal, wild, rooted in love rather than discipline — is the center of what makes the book unusual. The Wood, a forest that corrupts everything it touches, is one of the most effective horrors in recent fantasy. If the fairy-tale atmosphere, the mentor-student relationship with unexpected emotional weight, and the magic as something personal rather than systematic gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
A Deadly Education
by Naomi Novik
Novik's own YA trilogy — El discovers her magic at a school that kills students for survival. A Deadly Education has Uprooted's same sense of a female protagonist whose relationship to magic is personal and unexpected, and whose magic doesn't behave the way the experts around her expect.
- 2Buy
Spinning Silver
by Naomi Novik
Novik's own second standalone dark fairy tale — Miryem discovers she can turn silver into gold, which attracts the attention of the Staryk king. Directly comparable in register and quality to Uprooted, drawing on Russian and Jewish folklore in the same way Uprooted draws on Polish tradition.
- 3Buy
The Bear and the Nightingale
by Katherine Arden
A girl in medieval Russia who has her own relationship to the old gods and spirits that the Christian church is trying to drive out — Arden has Novik's same gift for Eastern European folk tradition as a source of fairy tale material, and the same sense of a female protagonist whose relationship to the magical is personal and dangerous.
- 4Buy
Circe
by Madeline Miller
A woman at the margins of mythology discovering that her power is larger and stranger than anyone acknowledged — Miller has Novik's same sense of a female protagonist whose magic is personal rather than institutional, and the same precision in prose that makes dark material feel earned rather than gratuitous.
- 5Buy
The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
Two magicians in a black-and-white circus, performing for an audience who doesn't know they're watching a contest — Morgenstern has Novik's same gift for a fairy-tale atmosphere that feels genuinely enchanted, and the same sense that magic is most powerful when it's also beautiful.
- 6Buy
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Two very different English magicians — the reclusive Norrell, who treats magic as a system to be controlled, and the reckless Strange, who treats it as a force to be engaged. The same central tension as Uprooted, between disciplined institutional magic and wild personal magic, but in Regency England rather than folk-tale Poland.
- 7Buy
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
A man who lives in a house that is larger than the world, who doesn't know how he got there — Clarke's most recent novel has Uprooted's same quality of a story that could only be told in this genre, told with complete calm, and the same sense of a protagonist who understands the world they're in more intimately than anyone else could.
- 8Buy
Strange the Dreamer
by Laini Taylor
An orphan librarian falls into a ruined city of gods and discovers a girl who is the last of a dying line — Taylor has Novik's same lushness and the same sense of a love story between two people from completely different relationships to power, told in prose that is doing more work than the plot requires.
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