Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "StarMark" by Katherine Hetzel

As a creative writer myself, and one already drafting a cycle of children’s stories, I came to this novel with a keen interest in seeing how an established author manages to appeal to both adults and younger readers alike. In StarMark, Katherine Hetzel manages this difficult tightrope walk with apparent ease. The fantasy world of Koltam is brimming with original myths and legends that appear to have their roots in Pagan and Celtic lore, but have a distinct character all their own. 

The central appeal of the novel though lies in the author’s careful crafting of a simple, yet engaging tale of one girl’s journey from childhood to adulthood, and all that implies.  Irvana is both brave and determined, highly likeable and appeals to all readers. She’s an excellent role-model for younger girls, particularly, in that she proves both fallible and willing to learn from her mistakes, whilst never appearing vulnerable. 

Hetzel’s profound skill is in presenting Irvana and those around her with a series of perils and encounters that develop the characters, but also encourage you to devour this short tome in one or two sittings. The dialogue is snappy and well-observed, as are the passages of description, which never detract from the immediacy of the action; the cast of antagonists are even given their own space to develop a connection with the reader, and this helps younger minds consider the grey shades of morality, not just its contrasting tones. I look forward to reading more by Hetzel, and seeing her expand this specific universe still further, taking her developing fan base with her. 


About the reviewer
Paul Taylor McCartney is currently Head of Secondary Teacher Education at Warwick University. He has enjoyed a long and varied teaching career in the discipline of English/Theatre Studies and is following a part-time PhD in Creative Writing with Leicester University, His research interests include dystopian studies, narratology and 20th century literary criticism.

Review by Lee Wright of "Death and the Seaside" by Alison Moore

Alison Moore’s novels feature no demons or monsters. Yet behind every closed door she makes you hear unsettling noises. Those noises are made by people. And hell is other people.    

A closeness to the real, day-to-day, small desperate lives filled with nothing moments. Characters who take unfulfilled, uncomfortable breaths. Her first two novels, The Lighthouse and He Wants, are close to the Southern Gothic tune of Carson McCullers. Like the girl from Georgia, Moore takes alienated individuals, and plunges them into unnatural societies, where they are experimented on by the shadier side of humanity. 

Her main protagonist in The Lighthouse, Futh, bares resemblance to McCullers’ deaf-mute, John Singer in McCullers’ stand out work of fiction, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Both men are isolated from within and longing for something they cannot get back. Both await lonely ends. Moore has made sure that the quarrelling tick has bitten and embedded itself in each character she invents. 

For her most recently published novel, Death and the Seaside, we discover the story of the milk skinned, failed writer that is Bonnie Falls (with Moore, there is always something in a name). Hers is a life left unfinished in every sense. Abandoned degree, missed chances, and underwhelming, overbearing parents. A would-be writer whose time is taken up by a disparaging cleaning job at a pharmaceutical building. Until the day she becomes involved with her scrutinising landlady, Sylvia Slythe. Then, Bonnie’s timid existence begins to collapse like a sandcastle beneath the tide. 

All of Moore’s novels are short and they linger like a vivid nightmare. At times, Death and the Seaside can appear like an interrogation of other novels (Irving’s The World According to Garp, Camus’ The Outsider, and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea among others are given a direct mention). 

And the ocean, or at least the appeal of it, is a recurring theme throughout Moore’s work (John Irving has his bears). In The Lighthouse, Futh crosses it. Lewis Sullivan in He Wants longs for it. And Bonnie Falls visits it.   

By the time Bonnie drives away from the encroaching sea, we are left with the slow burning pay off, questions are answered and our protagonist’s future far from certain.

In a time when most novels rely on formula, and great authors such as John Fowles, Raymond Carver and Carson McCullers are rarely talked about (outside of the wider read), Alison Moore, like DBC Pierre (Breakfast with the Borgias), represents a breed of writer who succeeds in painting a portrait of the inept and naïve side of human nature. Do not get too close to this kind of author, for they leave permanent scars. 

And long may they reign.  


About the reviewer 
Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in 2017.

Review by Robert Richardson of “Seurat To Riley: The Art Of Perception” at Compton Verney Art Gallery, Warwickshire. 8 July – 1 October 2017

Degas famously stated ‘Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.’ Seurat, his contemporary, responding to colour theories of his day took more direct action. His Pointillism juxtaposed individual brush strokes of contrasting colours to create shimmering effects. In addition to paintings by Seurat, the opening room of this excellent Compton Verney exhibition has a painting by that icon of 1960s art, Bridget Riley. This sets the agenda for her pervasive presence. Although the organisation of the artworks is mostly chronological, this is occasionally broken, but always with an intelligent thematic purpose in mind.

The exhibition proposes other precursors of 60s Op Art: the mathematical compositions of M.C. Escher and dynamic responses to machine movement by the Vorticist Helen Saunders. Perhaps more significant is Josef Albers. Better known for his investigations of colour, he is also represented here with compositions based on shapes and lines, their angles and varying thicknesses producing optical illusions of depth. As a leading member of the Bauhaus, it should not be a surprise that Albers approached optics with a combination of rationality and experiment.

When I visited this exhibition, I also attended a talk by Dr Frances Follin, who co-curated it with Compton Verney’s Penny Sexton. She presented some of her fascinating research on the reception of Riley’s work in the 1960s. One of the hot debates at the time was the position of mathematics and science in relation to Op Art. There were apparently scientists eager to escape the intrusion of art into their activities, thinking its populism might swamp their more serious intentions. Riley was going in the other direction, basing her art on an aesthetic of perception and an intuition that did not have mathematics or science as its basis (no matter how much it might be possible for others to interpret it in those terms). 

Riley’s technical realisations, through drawing, painting and printing media, are superb and part of her integrity as a leading artist. Her earliest works in black and white are stunning. To stand in front of Fail (1963) and Over (1966) is to experience the wobbling of visual perception and, even more incredibly, colours not physically present can nevertheless emerge. Her work is an invitation for the viewer to experience change and transformation. As with other Op Art work, this can bring about disorientation, but reality becoming unfixed is also exhilarating.

Fall by Bridget Riley

Follin’s talk expanded on the exhibition text that cited Op Art as part of a post-1945 movement towards greater participation in the making of art. Contemporaneous with 1960s “Happenings” Op Art led back to two dimensions that involved active perceptions of the viewer. It might be argued that visual art had always done this, but it had never before achieved it in such a heightened and powerful way. 

Although Riley predominates, there are plenty of wonderful artworks by other artists, notably Victor Vasarely, equal in importance to Riley, and someone more accepting of the mathematical. The paintings of British artist Peter Sedgley were a revelation to me. They are both majestic and subtle. He deliberately presents us with an out of focus effect, and our eyes conditioned to focus are nudged into perceptual movement.  He also uses colour, which of course Riley, after her classic black and white Op Art, also has as central to her practice.

The Venezuelan artists Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jésus Rafael Soto combined Kinetic Art with Op Art, and our own bodies are the kinetic element: giving the artworks Op Art movements by walking along them. A 2008 sculpture by Liliane Lyjn actually does spin round, and in doing so lines that are part of it move vertically without moving: it is perceptual illusion. The title is Clear Red Koan, with Koan being that Zen puzzle which creates doubt and paradox as a way towards truth.

Op Art still looks fresh and also continues to have an influence on some of today’s artists, as shown in the final rooms, with impressive work by Jim Lambie and the more established Daniel Buren. The exhibition ends with Lothar Götz taking over the walls of an entire room. With Salon Diagonale (Compton Verney), he has responded with shapes and colours to the architecture of the room and the Capability Brown parkland visible from its windows.  

This exhibition has received considerable press coverage and rave reviews, and rightly so. Anecdotally, at the end of the 90s I visited an exhibition at the Tate in Liverpool: a survey of British twentieth century art. From that selection, I thought Bridget Riley was one of the standout artists. It was a suitable judgment, because Riley and Op Art are not just about perception, but affirmation too.


About the reviewer
Robert Richardson is a visual artist and writer. His work is included in Artists’ Postcards: A Compendium (edited by Jeremy Cooper, published by Reaktion Books, London). He has recently exhibited online with the Paris/Barcelona based Corridor Elephant publishing project, and is a member of the Biennale Austria association of contemporary artists. In 2014, his solo exhibition TextSpaces was exhibited at Eugen Gomringer’s Kunsthaus Rehau in Germany. He is also the co-editor, with William Pratt, of Homage to Imagism (AMS Press, New York). His website is www.bobzlenz.com

Review by Amirah Mohiddin of "Dividing Lines," edited by Farhana Shaikh with a Foreword by C. G. Menon

Dividing Lines is an anthology of short stories dominated by themes of divisions of caste, gender and race. This lyrical and haunting collection brings to the surface a deep appreciation of life as well as a fear of the future. Frequently dealing with conflicts based on oppression and betrayal, Dividing Lines is an evocative representation of Asian experiences.

My first impression of the short stories was full of excitement. It’s rare to see such a diverse collection of short stories, and each really gave a different view of culture. It’s difficult to find media representations which break down the walls of stereotypes. The themes of belonging and division are so strong in some stories such as Ashok Patel’s ‘Ninety Days’ and Serena Patel’s ‘The Other Side of the Bridge.’ These stories offer an insight into how racism can have devastating consequences for minority communities. 

The stories are not only infected by fear but also a psychological burden that emotionally cripples the mood of the society they are set in. ‘The Other Side of the Bridge’ takes us into a bleak future while ‘Ninety Days’ tells the story of Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians in the 1970s. Two of my favourite quotations from ‘The Other Side of the Bridge’ were: ‘I didn’t belong there and maybe I don’t belong here’ and ‘I don’t seem to be here or anywhere else anymore.’ These powerful lines in an all-round heart-wrenching story quickly became my favourites because of the pain they reflect. The scary in-between where you’re lost and can’t go back or move forwards particularly reached out to me due to my own hybridity as a British Asian continuously trying to find the balance between the expectations of British society and my deep-rooted Indian values and heritage. 

Another story I really enjoyed was ‘Under the Same Sky’ by Farhana Khalique. I could relate to the soft and comforting childhood experiences and innocence. The use of space imagery and this idea that somehow we’re all connected through the sky no matter who and where we are added to its magic. I would definitely recommend the Dividing Lines anthology. It’s one of those collections that is an all-round emotional rollercoaster, featuring relatable characters and a wide selection of writing styles. 

About the reviewer

Amirah Mohiddin, born in Birmingham, U.K., is a BA English (with Creative Writing) graduate. She is an aspiring writer, a storyteller for young children, a volunteering editor for Seeing Ear. Her latest project is about a female warrior in a fictional middle eastern war-torn kingdom.

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The Sorry History of Fast Food" by Paul Sutton

In her book The Poem and the Journey, Ruth Padel suggests that ‘all poetry is about loss: about being, at the same time, in one place and another you can’t get to, or can’t get back to.’ If this is true – and, like any generalisation, it is debatable – then poetry is always in danger of a nostalgic conservatism, looking back through rose-tinted spectacles to better places, pasts and people which have been lost. Not unlike the Daily Mail, with its constant harking back to a fake version of the 1950s, poetry’s present becomes a poor substitute for some utopian ideal which has been lost – something which perhaps never really existed in the first place. 

Certainly, some contemporary British poetry is susceptible to this kind of nostalgic conservatism and backward-looking political quietism. By contrast, judging by his new pamphlet The Sorry History of Fast Food (Open House Editions, 2017), Paul Sutton’s poetry emphatically is not – even though it too is all about loss. His poetry is angry, politicised, nuanced, paradoxical, and ambivalent about both present and past – and hence about as far from a simplistic Daily Mail nostalgia as it is possible to get. Indeed, Sutton arguably satirises such monolithic nostalgia directly in his poem ‘Jupiter,’ where ‘Holst’s giddy joy,’ which seems to embody ‘pride, history and triumph, / … green English fields – / assurance, love, trust,’ is really ‘only a sound, / pure cadence; / just words.’ Though it inspires ‘old feelings’ in the listener, Gustav Holst’s famous piece of music seems to represent an Englishness, or Britishness which has only ever existed in music and words – an Englishness which has always already been lost.
   
Beyond the experience of Holst’s music, Sutton’s ‘old feelings’ of loss are much more complex, conflicted. On the one hand, the pamphlet is all about what has been lost through ‘the sorry history of fast food’ in modern Britain: with its urban gentrification, the ‘regeneration of King’s Cross / or even worse Paddington,’ its ‘frozen food,’ and ‘motorway service station[s]’ and their ‘invocation of oblivion,’ it would seem that ‘our true country’ has become ‘pure retail park, B & Q.’ Undoubtedly, this all represents ‘such a loss,’ for Sutton - but, on the other hand, the past itself is no golden age; the past itself is ambivalent, with its ‘coffee … [like] Thames mud,’ shops which had the ‘aroma of an old man’s crotch,’ the ‘rain [that] smelt like bomb damage,’ the ‘Victorian chophouse[s]’ and ‘Elizabethan / “offal and hoof quickbits.”’ In this respect, Sutton’s sense of loss might be termed a ‘dirty nostalgia,’ a harking-back to a past which was ‘loved … all the more for being so bad.’

This dirty nostalgia reaches its apotheosis in the poems ‘My Boy Jack’ and ‘Street Chicken,’ in which the narrators look back to Jack the Ripper, and attempt – nostalgically, as it were – to connect themselves with a frankly horrific past. In their narrators’ attempts to ‘trace [their] … history / through such disasters,’ these poems critique a poetry of loss, expose the dark side of poetic nostalgia. 


About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor's books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. 

Review by Alexandros Plasatis of "Conjunctions:67 - Other Aliens"

"Published by Bard College, with editorial offices in New York City and Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Conjunctions is a cornerstone of contemporary literary publishing. Since 1981, the journal has been a living notebook in which authors can write freely and audiences read dangerously" Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions editor.

This starts with two stories by Leena Krohn, translated from Finnish by Eva Buchwald. Sweet beginning, I thought, foreign. Nice, slightly eerie stuff. The first story, a story that made me feel a little sad, is entitled In the Quiet of the Gardens and is about Sylvia’s private world as we see it portrayed in her own creations of miniature gardens.

Later on in the volume, in Clouds, by Julia Elliott, an earth-woman and a sky-man go in a tavern and get hammered on organic, biodynamic wine from a local vineyard where they bury bull horns crammed with cow manure to add to the taste (if you’re into this sort of stuff and you live near Valley Falls State Park in West Virginia, please visit the Red Wolf Tavern). After getting drunk, they end up in bed, where the earth-woman explores the sky-man’s anatomy: firm chest, uncircumcised erection. They have mammalian sex (with satisfying crescendos), and the earth-woman gets pregnant and gives birth to a half earth- half cloud-baby, Adelaide. The problems begin when the earth-woman meets her sky-woman mother-in-law. Ah, mothers-in-law, you always, always mess things up.

In Valerie Martin’s Bromley Hall, Americans Janet and Frank visit the UK, but Janet isn’t happy with the hotel room they stay in and wants to be moved to another one and this really pisses off Frank who, in order to punish her, refuses to go to Bromley Hall with her. Janet doesn’t give a shit and decides to go on her own. Big mistake, Janet. So she gets on a bus driven by a very weird Indian man, then the bus breaks down in the middle of the highway (motorway…) and Janet feels all adventurous and walks off to find Bromley Hall. This is when she really starts missing Frank, and she will miss him much, much more when she gets to meet the DNA samplers…

Tinkerers by Lavie Tidhar takes place on the Mountains of the Moon. Atmospheric night-prose here, with farting horses, donkeys, scorpions, caiques, and the Stranger in a lonesome journey, riding away from the Doinklands and into wild, dark forests, until he comes across a couple of tinkerers (dwarfs) and their wagon. I liked these two characters, the dwarfs, they were funny and scary at the same time. I felt blessed being a smoker while reading this story – that bit about the pipe stuffed with cherry-flavoured tobacco got me going.          

Tinkerers is followed by an interview with Samuel R. Delany, conducted by Brian Evenson, which I found very, very interesting and informative, and, actually, an entertaining read. After that, there is a sad story with a very beautiful ending, Matthew Baker’s Transition.

50 pages of Conjunctions 67 consist of a selection of letters from James Tiptree, Jr. (the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon) to the feminist SF writer Joanna Russ (who, for most of the time, didn’t know that Tiptree was a woman). Nicole Nyhan did a great job gathering and slightly editing those letters. There are many moments in those letters where the writing is beautiful and sharp, and there’s plenty of advice for writers.

The Process Is a Process All Its Own, by Peter Straub, is another beautiful story in this volume. It’s a horror story (I went to the toilet 4 times) that won’t let your mind drift away, and which, sometimes, made me smile with its clever prose (Only the strongest, most distinctively individuated, if that’s a word, of individuals can control the colorations of the words that pass through them).

In the pages of Conjunctions you will also find Madeline Bourque Kearin’s first ever literary publication. Her strength, I found, lays in beautiful descriptions: “I watched the buds on trees open and close like grasping fists and watched the pink blooms of rhododendrons yawn in and out of existence.”  

Joyce Carol Oates is a long-time Conjunctions contributor. I never read any of her stuff. For some reason I had this idea that her writing was King Kong-like, you know, dark, with heavy balls, and sloooow, one step …zzzvvvbooom… another step half an hour later, zzzvvbam…. The Undocumented Alien was nothing like what I imaged though, the prose was lively and funny and energetic, zip zip zip, mosquito-sounding-like, minus the annoyance.

I won’t write anything about E. G. Willy’s short story Radio City, except to say that I’m an admirer of his work now. Great style there, fantastic dialogues, a pure joy, fantastic, great fiction, amazing, amazing, so good (that’s my Trump impersonation).

There are many more beautiful stories in there, there are poems, a play, interviews and discussions. I’d like to close with an apology to those contributors that I didn’t mention in this little review of mine.

I’m not a big SF, fantasy or aliens reader, and, still, I’m glad I have a copy of Conjunctions 67.       

About the reviewer

Alexandros Plasatis is an immigrant ethnographer who writes fiction in English, his second language. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in UK and American anthologies and magazines: Meat For Tea, Meridian, Aji, Adelaide, Bull, Unthology, Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud, Crystal Voices, blÆkk, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, and Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class. He is a volunteer at Leicester City of Sanctuary, where he helps find and develop new creative talent within the refugee and asylum seeker community. He lives in Leicester, UK. 

Review by Luke McNamara of "Risk the Pier" by Shelley Roche-Jacques

From free verse to the ballad Shelley Roche-Jacques demonstrates her ability to execute a wide spectrum of forms, as well as her ability to assume the perspective of a range of characters in her new collection Risk the Pier. Ranging from a mental health patient, a murderer, a struggling parent, the disgruntled everyman, to an innkeeper’s wife, Jacques’s collection traverses the landscape of the 19th century – with her allusions to Chekhov, Browning, and the Great Sheffield Flood – as well as the modern day.

Thematically blending voices two hundred years apart through her occupation with social realism and the tribulations faced by every manner of person, this time travelling collection never feels disjointed or chaotic. The highlight of part one (Men, Women and Mice) for me is ‘Shrink,’ telling the tale of a mother suffering mental health issues, triggered by Robin Thicke’s blurred lines. Roche-Jacques highlights the relentless and unforgiving torment of social media for the speaker’s decisions; a trap which so many find themselves in. 

A standout from part two (Somewhere to Get to) is ‘We Do Not Mention.’ Roche-Jacques’s fruitful yet controlled use of conduplicatio over the phrases ‘the meat was tough’ and ‘do the washing up and then make love’ symbolises the mundane repetition of married life for both man and woman. Yet both continue to live such a life ‘not mentioning’ how bored they really are. 

Part three (Claims – Voices from the Great Inundation of 1864) is principally an anecdotal collection relaying the untold tales of this tragedy. For me the final poem of the collection – ‘Claim for Mary Ann Pickering, Aged 8’ - is the strongest. Roche-Jacques’s anaphora in the final stanza elegantly conveys the heart-break of a mother who desperately, yet unsuccessfully attempts to recover her daughter’s personality.  

Overall, the collection continues a trend in modern poetry to employ the free verse form to relay the experiences and suffering of many different kinds of people, but Roche-Jacques succeeds in capturing not only the voices of the millennial generation, but also those of the Victorians.


About the reviewer

A graduate in literature, soon to undertake an MA in Modern Literature and Creative Writing, Luke McNamara has a passion for experimental literature. He was previously on the Creative Writing Committee for the University of Leicester, and has aspirations to see his own novels and poetry published one day. 

Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "The Book Index": An Exhibition at the Bodleian Library

It’s hard enough to display books interestingly, but book indexes? This I have got to see, I thought, so I travelled up to Oxford last month and picked my way through the city’s shops, tour parties and bicycles to the Bodleian Library, where there turns out to be … one display case.

Still, it covers a lot of ground. First are early Bible concordances (from 1230 onwards) – alphabetical lists of key words together with the passages they come from. These were the models for all subsequent alphabetical indexes, we are told. The curators have grouped three of them with a ‘Goldilocks’ motif – one too small (the size of a smartphone), one too big and unwieldy, and one just the right size. 

Then there is a charming list of individual squiggles put together by early medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste, each of which he assigned to one of 440 topics such as ‘Imagination’ and ‘Existence of God’, then used in the margins of books when the writers mentioned these things. 

Next are the first known page numbers, in a book printed in Cologne in 1490, followed by playful indexes by Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf. Lastly we have artist Tom Phillips’s concordance to The Human Document by W H Mallock, a 19th-century book which he picked up at random in a bookshop in 1966 and vowed to use as the basis for a long-term artwork. Since then he has brought out six editions of the book, calling it Humument (see http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument/introduction) most pages worked over by him artistically at least twice. Here is one of the pages, the text now illegible under Phillips’s ink except for a few words picked out in white bubbles to make a nonsense sentence. Phillips’s concordance to the novel is a brown pocketbook with tiny lists of handwritten words.

The display is thus bookended with two concordances, the first a necessary accompaniment to a central text of the time, the last a private aid for an idiosyncratic artwork.

But have search boxes put indexes out of business? ‘Ctrl +F is not the same as a good subject index,’ claims the display text. Is this true? Well, a good index is not an automatically compiled list of words but the work of someone trained in choosing and ordering the most important ones, and thus should have some intellectual credibility. An index also offers chance discoveries – you may find things by accident when browsing through it, not so likely when starting off with your own search terms. An index is also I suppose a production in itself, like a noun-heavy summary of the book with wonky syntax and a non-chronological order. A search box, by contrast, is not a work but a tool, albeit a very powerful one. And of course you can’t use them with paper. 

Still, indexes will have to argue much harder for themselves in the age of the e-book. This display, by showing that indexes have functioned for hundreds of years as ways of mapping reading and thought, is part of that argument.

The Book Index was at the Bodleian Library, Oxford from 28 May - 9 July 2017.


About the reviewer
Rebecca Reynolds is a teacher, writer and editor. Her book Curiosities from the Cabinet: Objects and Voices from Britain's Museums was published in February this year. She blogs here.

Review by Rachel Evans of "Uprooted" by Naomi Novik

(Some spoilers!)

Much like the terrifying and sentient Wood at the centre of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, this novel reaches out with subtle violence, wraps its tendrils around your expectations and pulls them out from under your feet, leaving you (and your beliefs about what fantasy should be) altered for good. Fortunately for you, gentle reader, Novik is happy to take you by the hand and show you the safest route, saving you from any twisted ankles – or absolute insanity.

The tense stalemate between the two warring nations of Polnya and Rosya is but an abstract threat for Agnieszka, resident of the village of Dvernik, located on the border of The Wood. The most pressing issue for Nieszka, who happens to be Dragon Born, is the almost inevitable loss of Kasia, her best friend and fellow Dragon Born; for the Dragon chooses one girl from the surrounding area, and keeps her for ten years. In return for this, he protects the towns and villages from the constant, malevolent onslaught of The Wood.

Of course, this is not what happens. In a slightly predictable (and yet effective) twist, the Dragon ends up abruptly whisking her off to his lair – uh – tower. Apologies Ann Rice fans, but this Dragon is, in actual fact, a Wizard. He abandons Nieszka at the top of his tower without so much as a word of acknowledgement, leaving her to the realisation that she is going to spend the next ten years of her life locked up with him, not Kasia.  Unfortunately (fortunately) for the Dragon, Nieszka is not one to sit quietly and take instruction. Despite, or more accurately, because of his generally terrible behaviour, it is highly satisfying to witness Nieszka’s determination to make his life as difficult as possible. Nieszka’s vibrancy and agency in a world that is constrained not only by gender, but also class (making her pretty low on the food-chain) proves that there is scope for more female-driven fantasy that does not rely on the (boring) idea that 'women can do what men can, but in heels.'

The first third of the book focuses on world building, and brings to life the living, breathing threat of The Wood. It is refreshing to have a completely different antagonist to the usual run-of-the-mill demon/necromancer/manic ruler. The Wood is a genuinely terrifying creation, filled with all manner of creatures and malice that are hell-bent on destroying humanity. Beyond The Wood are Polnya and Rosya (Poland and Russia respectively), who have been at war with each other since the Polnyan queen disappeared with the Rosyan prince (into… you guessed it, The Wood!) These combine to create a backdrop of conflict and tension that feeds into every aspect of the story.

The rest of the book moves rapidly through a complex and sometimes confusing narrative. One could argue that the story doesn’t quite work in its current form, and could benefit with either being trimmed down or expanded into a multi-book series – there is certainly a wealth of material to draw from, both within the fictional world, and the mythological corpus on which it is based. In fact, the only true criticism that I have of Uprooted is its need to be everything at once; both high fantasy, multi-series epic and punchy one-off; YA but also oh-so-adult (some of the overarching themes and scenes in The Wood are highly disturbing); action-fantasy-thriller and romance. In fact, it is the romance aspect of the story that lets it down the most, something that I found incredibly disappointing. For all of Novik’s innovation with The Wood and Nieszka’s system of magic, there is a woeful lack of imagination and diversity when it comes to l-o-v-e. Initially, I thought that there was going to be a queer relationship between Nieszka and Kasia, and I was overjoyed. Those high hopes were crushed, however, when Novik practically forces the Dragon and Nieszka into a tryst that neither of them seems to want. The resulting relationship is both awkward and lack-lustre.

Despite the issues with pacing and with character interrelationships (both of which may have been better addressed in a multi-book format?), Uprooted is still a vastly enjoyable read. Novik’s prose is both evocative and hypnotic, and the way in which she builds the world of Polnya, Rosya, and The Wood is so immersive that it is possible to forget that you are reading a novel. Finally, Nieszka is a character that would cause me much distress if we were friends in real life; which is exactly what makes her such an excellent protagonist to guide you through the deepest, darkest parts of The Wood in order to reach the other side, both changed, and yet exactly the same.

 

About the reviewer

I am a first-year PhD student exploring the connections between gender and textiles in Old Norse literature at the University of Leicester. In my spare time I like to read (mostly dystopian, speculative or fantasy novels) and knit.