UPROOTED and the Generation Gap in Fantasy
So this week Naomi Novik's Uprooted won the Nebula Award, and as a result a lot of people are reading it. And the reactions, as they have been pretty much ever since the book came out, are... mixed
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- the Polish cultural influence
- the use of language to build magic
- the Woods as menace
The main characters didn't really figure as anything people latched onto, although that's just a Twitter poll, and I haven't made a scientific study of Goodreads reviews. (Beyond noticing that a lot of the one-star reviews highlight the Polish influence and language as a negative, which is ... unfortunate and horrible.)
A Thousand Nights is the most obvious execution of similar tropes, but I'm also reminded of Poison Study by Maria V Snyder, which I strongly suspect had its origins in Snape/Hermione fic. Come to think of it, I also noped out of that because I didn't like the hero. But "girl who thinks she is ordinary is singled out, turns out to have immense powers she wasn't aware of" is beyond cliché.
I'm now about 25% in, and liking the execution better now that Agnieska is being competent and not literally cringing on the floor and crawling away from the Dragon, but wow, that first quarter made a bad impression.
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Anyway, "girl who thinks she is ordinary is singled out, turns out to have immense powers she wasn't aware of" is one of my favorite tropes, so for me that would be a selling point. Just because the basic idea has been done doesn't mean there aren't fresh and thoughtful ways of executing it, as A Thousand Nights certainly proves. (Though arguably that's more a case of "ordinary girl gains immense powers due to support she wasn't aware of", I'd say. Shadow and Bone might be a more accurate example.)
I did like the characters, as it happens, although their relationships and reactions in the first quarter are incredibly frustrating and indeed cringeworthily painful at times, so I hear you.
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Forever searching for a good YA novel about a girl assassin, that's us!
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Speaking of girl assassins, did you ever read any of Robin LaFevers' medieval killer nun books? I have only read the first, but heard good things about the remaining two.
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(Me, writing my 1924 Chinese-Australian girl detective story: "Okay, no one will notice if her mentor is a Chinese woman with a penchant for wearing green suits and also her name is Alexis Lin. Right? RIGHT?")
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Sadly, the three books in the series are now long OP and thus less easy to find than they should be. But for lively girl-assassin adventure I can't think of anything else that comes close to these.
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I really liked Poison Study, because it ticked a number of boxes with me, such as Mentor/Apprentice with actual interesting things to learn (I liked the poison stuff, it was sciency) where the Mentor is really dark and mysterious; and the bonus "woman is pretending to be a man because sexist society" is another one I like. Plus the whole dilemma that Our Heroine is likely to die at any moment made it excitingly tense. And I liked some of the worldbuilding -- a Fantasy novel with a Republic in it! Way cool. Other bits of the worldbuilding had me rather eyerolly - "theobroma" was obviously chocolate, couldn't she think of a less obvious name for it?
However, the next story in the series (Magic Study?) completely turned me off the series and author. It was just so obviously Mary-Sue Speshul, and it didn't have any of the things I liked in the previous story, and more of the stuff I didn't like.
The Snape/Hermione connection didn't even occur to me, but now that you mention it...
As I noted above, yes, dark-and-mysterious mentor, true, but I considered that more of a Byronic Hero trope than specifically a Snape/Hermione dynamic, because Our Heroine didn't really feel like a Hermione to me.
Anyway, "girl who thinks she is ordinary is singled out, turns out to have immense powers she wasn't aware of" is one of my favorite tropes, so for me that would be a selling point. Just because the basic idea has been done doesn't mean there aren't fresh and thoughtful ways of executing it,
Such as Ultraviolet. (smirk)
One of my writing mentors said "There is no such thing as an original idea, only an original treatment."
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Sometimes I wish I could read the book that other people are reading instead of the book as I see it, if you know what I mean...
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One of my writing mentors said "There is no such thing as an original idea, only an original treatment."
In "Emily of New Moon" (by L.M. Montgomery) Emily's teacher tells her that there are only 7 original plots. Everything else is a treatment of those seven.
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