Uprooted

Naomi Novik has said Uprooted comes from the Polish stories she was told as a child, and the book is dedicated to her mother for them. The Wood is the folkloric forest rather than a fantasy one: not a place with monsters in it but a place that is itself hostile, that takes people, and that returns them changed and worse. Agnieszka's magic is learned by feel and by rhyme rather than by system, which is the folk-tale's way of knowing things. Baba Jaga is named in the text as a historical figure whose spellbook survives, which is the book's neatest move: it takes the witch of the tales and treats her as a real practitioner with a bibliography.