Uprooted
"Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that's not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he's still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of use every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we're grateful, but not that grateful."
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Every ten years the cold wizard known as the Dragon takes a seventeen-year-old girl from the valley of the Spindle as the price of holding back the corrupted Wood. Agnieszka is sure her friend Kasia will be chosen, until the day the Dragon picks her instead and pulls her up into his stone tower.
It has one explicit sex scene and several sensual passages, so it sits in the spicier end of YA-adjacent fantasy. It is not erotica.
It has one explicit sex scene and several sensual passages, so it sits in the spicier end of YA-adjacent fantasy. It is not erotica.
It is a standalone novel set in a fairy-tale-inspired world. Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver is set in the same loose universe but follows separate characters.
It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2015 and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2016. It was a Hugo Award finalist.
Uprooted was written by Naomi Novik, published in 2015 by Del Rey.
Uprooted is 438 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Uprooted takes most readers 7 to 9 hours to finish.
Uprooted is a standalone novel by Naomi Novik, not part of a series.
Uprooted is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
