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Books by Naomi Novik
Uprooted
by Naomi Novik
· published 2015 · read 2018-07-21
★★★★☆
Uprooted by Naomi Novik was a perfect fantasy story/fairytale. It's got all the right parts (dark magic, regular magic, unimpressed heroine, ambivalent wizard, etc), but isn't terribly predictable, and forms real characters instead of shadows of well-known archetypes. By following the easy-to-like first-person narrator Agnieszka, and seeing her relate to the Dragon, her best friend Kasia, and all the others, painted a vivid and realistic picture of the world. We even get a surprising amount of moral ambivalence, considering the genre. A very good book. I may start to read Naomi Novik's fantasy series if Uprooted is any indicator for that series' quality.
A Deadly Education
by Naomi Novik
· published 2020 · read 2022-08-25
★★★★☆
You know what? I had fun. There. Yeah, it's bleak. Yeah, I can't defend why I had fun with this one and not with, say, the similarly murdery Murderbot or the also try-hard narrator of Gideon the Ninth (though that one was more obnoxious!), both of which it's fairly close to. But I did have fun, and that's that. While reading, I wrote a friend: "this is one of the things that will be lost to my memory: it's annoying while I'm reading it, but looking back I'll only remember the better parts". Yup, that did end up happening! (Not sure I had fun enough to read the entire series, mind – it is very YA, wannabe-edgy, moody broody teenager stuff. Much of the wide spectrum of minority representations felt forced in a way that reminded me of Wayward Children. But yes, still fun, and maybe it's just that I'm a sucker for magic schools.) This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.
His Majesty’s Dragon
by Naomi Novik
· published 2006 · read 2022-11-28
★★★☆☆
Very nice, if you're into Age of Sail, sparkling aristocrat bullshit. I happen to like that sort of thing. I like Dumas, ffs, so it should surprise absolutely nobody that "Master and Commander, but with dragons" works pretty well for me. The dragons were surprisingly cool and non-generic, and the care for them, too. Obviously zero character depth, single-adjective characters, villains scowling evilly while mistreating kittens and so on, but that's just part of the genre. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.